Children's Wartime Adventure Novels

Non-fiction, eBook -- Experience World War II like an American 12-year-old!  This compilation of middle-grade and young adult books influenced children during World War II -- who came to be known as the Silent Generation.  Explore the pop culture, with its triumphs, its failings, and its lessons.  Color images.  

Review from PUBLISHERS WEEKLY:  

"Lynch illuminates a fascinating, little-studied chapter of publishing history in this study of exactly what the title suggests: World War II adventure novels for young American readers, printed during—and in a few cases before—U.S. involvement in the war itself, in which protagonists in their late teens and early 20s set aside the anxieties of youth to do their part to stomp out fascism. In title after title, pilots and soldiers (the men, mostly) and nurses, reporters, WACs, WASPS, WAVES, and more (the women) evince courage, endurance, dedication to the cause, and a savvy sense for identifying fifth columnists. Lynch celebrates the novels' sense of "spirited adventure" and ethos of "patriotic self-sacrifice" while digging into thorny questions of propaganda and indoctrination, including racial and ethnic stereotyping...

Lynch writes with infectious enthusiasm for the subject, soaring through detailed summaries of the stories of dozens of books like Red Randall at Pearl Harbor, Nancy Blake, Copywriter, and the surprisingly grim nurse adventure Ann Bartlett at Bataan, which is frank about wartime surgery: "a tattered mass of flesh and bone." Especially engaging are Lynch's considerations of the differences between the novels with girl heroes—these stories of the "protectors of the homefront" sometimes boasted career advice and a "surprisingly feminist spark of independence and derring-do"—and the high-flying, battle-oriented novels starring boys...

 Late chapters surveying questions of patriotism and stereotypes across a host of books, though, offer continual revelations and insights, a rich contribution to the study of American literature and propaganda. These books deserve serious study.