How many stories do you know of that deal with severe disfigurement and war injuries? This one! I promise it’s way, way better than the summary I just gave you.

Brothers Far From Home: The World War I Diary of Eliza Bates, Uxbridge, Ontario, 1916, Jean Little, 2003.

Now there aren’t a lot of books that cover the First World War with the grace and fluidity that this one does, and there’s vanishingly few other books that cover disfigurement and the postwar experience for a YA audience.  I love Jean Little, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned many thousands of times before to anyone who will listen, and her own experience with disability really gives this book an aspect of gravity and beauty that I don’t know if it would have had otherwise.

This is a pretty heavy book (as are many First World War books, since as you know there was a great deal of death involved), but it manages to have its moments of comedy without going overboard with it. It’s a remarkably well done little bit of literature. Let’s get going.

Eliza is in the middle of seven children who belong to a minister and his wife in Uxbridge, which is actually not too super far from where I live (which has nothing to do with anything other than being a interesting fact for myself).  You know, I feel like the trope of Lonely Middle Child has been somewhat abandoned in recent years, since families with a LOT of kids don’t show up in a lot of literature anymore. Eliza suffers from “not old enough to be with the older kids, too old to be with the little kids,” and has to share a room with her older sister Verity, whom she hates—mostly because Verity sees her as a little kid. It’s hard as an adult not to sympathize with Verity a bit, though—she’s seventeen and hanging out with their brother Jack, who is on his last leave before heading overseas, and his best friend Rufus, same. This is one of those things where as a kid, you’d be on fire with righteous indignation, but having been through the misery of your late teenage years, you completely, completely understand.

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Apparently, it’s CanCon November! All Canadian content, all the time. Here’s something nice and cheery just in time for Remembrance Day.

If I Die Before I Wake: The Flu Epidemic Diary of Fiona Macgregor, Toronto, Ontario, 1918, Jean Little, 2007.

Let’s get one thing straight: Jean Little is a Canadian treasure. If you’re American, like I am, and didn’t discover her works until later, you are absolutely missing out. She’s written several Dear Canada novels and they’re all spectacular, a ridiculous number of other great books, and teaches children’s literature at Guelph. She’s amazing and touches on really horrible issues and problems, but she writes so beautifully and clearly—there are some novelists who write about child abuse or disabilities for a children’s audience, but they can be stilted or awkward—for Jean Little, never. She handles everything with such a deft and beautiful touch.

That being said, this is an incredibly hard book to review. I think as a rule Dear Canada books tend to shy away less and are less flinching when it comes to illness and death, and this is a terrific example. While in Dear America books death comes in the background or to a tertiary character, in DC books there’s no hiding from it. It’s more realistic, in its way, but it’s also much more difficult to read. This book focuses on the Spanish Flu epidemic, but there’s another one that touches on the polio epidemic in the 40s that I’ll get to eventually, and it is brutal and totally straightforward. The protagonist is twelve years old, but honestly, I would have had a tough time with this book at age twelve.

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