Scan barcode
brampton's review
2.0
I approached this book expecting it to be an examination of WHY young boys would volunteer when they had a perfectly valid excuse not to go to war. It touches on that but not in great depth.
Instead it is the "stories" of these boys as best can be gleaned from their services records with a lot speculation added in. For example one boy lived in Caulfield and was a gardener and Caulfield has a race course so we are told that he was possibly a gardener at the race course. Every page is littered with "likely", "possibly" and "suggests" which adds colour but not much else.
Also a lot of the book is just a retelling of the actions the boys' units were engaged in with a lot of detail and quotes that are very familiar from other books.
I found the format of the book with sentences pulled out and printed in large type to maintain our interest annoying (along with a few typos), but that might not be the authors choice.
Overall it's an interesting subject, but I would recommend readers get on the National Archives website and look at the original sources. There's something very visceral about seeing the actual signature of a seventeen year old eagerly singing his life away.
Instead it is the "stories" of these boys as best can be gleaned from their services records with a lot speculation added in. For example one boy lived in Caulfield and was a gardener and Caulfield has a race course so we are told that he was possibly a gardener at the race course. Every page is littered with "likely", "possibly" and "suggests" which adds colour but not much else.
Also a lot of the book is just a retelling of the actions the boys' units were engaged in with a lot of detail and quotes that are very familiar from other books.
I found the format of the book with sentences pulled out and printed in large type to maintain our interest annoying (along with a few typos), but that might not be the authors choice.
Overall it's an interesting subject, but I would recommend readers get on the National Archives website and look at the original sources. There's something very visceral about seeing the actual signature of a seventeen year old eagerly singing his life away.
meganmorrissey's review
5.0
I was a Judge for the 2020 Indie Book Awards. The review submitted as part of the process is below. A word count was adhered to.
In The Lost Boys we read the incredible stories of boys in WW1 such as that of Billy Jackson, a 16-year-old who had his hand blown off by a shell and still went out looking for other wounded to bring back to safety. The photographs in this book show just how young these boys really were in a way that just telling us their age could never suffice. We see the boys wearing uniforms that barely fit them, faces full of pride. Whilst reading each of their extraordinary stories, I found myself flicking back the pages to look at their photographs again and again. The images are haunting and yet are the perfect companion to the stories - it would have been a different book without them. Byrnes mentions in the book that he hopes younger people will read this book and he has written in a way that people with little prior knowledge would still understand. That said, this book isn't just for the younger generation, it's for everyone. It is a remarkable book that should be on bookshelves in every home. This is a book that will stay with me, in my thoughts, for a long time.
In The Lost Boys we read the incredible stories of boys in WW1 such as that of Billy Jackson, a 16-year-old who had his hand blown off by a shell and still went out looking for other wounded to bring back to safety. The photographs in this book show just how young these boys really were in a way that just telling us their age could never suffice. We see the boys wearing uniforms that barely fit them, faces full of pride. Whilst reading each of their extraordinary stories, I found myself flicking back the pages to look at their photographs again and again. The images are haunting and yet are the perfect companion to the stories - it would have been a different book without them. Byrnes mentions in the book that he hopes younger people will read this book and he has written in a way that people with little prior knowledge would still understand. That said, this book isn't just for the younger generation, it's for everyone. It is a remarkable book that should be on bookshelves in every home. This is a book that will stay with me, in my thoughts, for a long time.
More...