WITHOUT WARNING

When army recruiters come to 15-year-old Ellen Wilkins’s English village, 27 men sign on for king and country. It’s a familiar WWI story of young men off to fight God’s crusade against the devil, have an adventure and return as heroes. Ellen’s brother Jack is one who enlists and, as readers will predict, he returns shattered and bitter. Ellen helps him to recover and decides to become a nurse to help other soldiers. Soon she’s off to Abbeville, France, treating the bloodied and mangled bodies that arrive, stretcher after stretcher, the whole of her eight months of service. This is an artfully written, layered novel that goes deeper than a lesson about the folly of war. It’s about people standing up to the prejudices in a small town, people being good in the midst of so much bad and a young woman transcending the expectations of class and gender to find strength and truth, even if one truth is the understanding that “one day everything we have just been through will start all over again.” (Fiction. 12+)