The Great War | Bookish Serendipity

Happy Friday, friends! I am stealing a couple of minutes this morning to spend some time with my blog. The skies have been gray and I have been feeling particularly tired (more on that another day) and blog writing almost always recharges my batteries. So I have a cup of tea at my side, Yo-Yo Ma in my ears, and a cat in my lap — and I’m ready to write!

Many of you know how much I love experiencing bookish serendipity. I recently had the perfect marriage in my reading: two books about The Great War; one adult novel and one read-aloud with my children.

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In Memoriam is a novel about two men who fall in love during WWI. It was beautifully written and their story was so compelling. I was on the edge of my seat throughout the novel worrying about their very existence. This book was full of painful imagery: it merely brushed the surface of the brutality of war and its effects on human bodies and psyches. Most significantly for me, it crystallized the facts about just how many people were killed during the war.

Winnie’s Great War is the real journey of the bear who inspired A. A. Milne to write Winnie-the-Pooh. We meet Winnie in the forests of Canada with her mother and follow her across the ocean to Salisbury Plains, and into London where she waited for the boy who adopted her to return from the war. This was a child-friendly version of the Great War with a beautiful message: with open hearts, we can truly hear each other. I loved every second of reading this aloud with B+B and am so thankful it came into our lives.

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There’s something about reading a really difficult book alongside a story written for children that deepens the experiences of both. I found the experiences of the soldiers in Winnie’s Great War much more heart-wrenching knowing the reality they faced during the war. I shed quite a few tears knowing what was in store for their regiment and the whole world around them. And I learned a few things about what London was like during the war. We can learn so much through children’s literature.

And to bring this all even closer to home, we begin studying WWI during our history lessons next week (using The History Book, History Year by Year, When on Earth, and A Child Through Time, along with the fourth level of Torchlight Curriculum).

How lucky are we to have such a vast world of learning right at our fingertips?

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I hope you all have weekends full of exactly what you need. Take good care.