It is 1915 and the First World War has only just begun.
17 year old Sasha is a well-to-do, sheltered-English girl. Just as her brother Thomas longs to be a doctor, she wants to nurse, yet girls of her class don't do that kind of work. But as the war begins and the hospitals fill with young soldiers, she gets a chance to help. But working in the hospital confirms what Sasha has suspected--she can see when someone is going to die. Her premonitions show her the brutal horrors on the battlefields of the Somme, and the faces of the soldiers who will die. And one of them is her brother Thomas.
Pretending to be a real nurse, Sasha goes behind the front lines searching for Thomas, risking her own life as she races to find him, and somehow prevent his death.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Marcus Sedgwick is the award-winning author of Floodland, Witch Hill, The Dark Horse, The Book of Dead Days, and The Dark Flight Down. He is a sales representative for Walker Books in London. The author lives in England.
From the Hardcover edition.
*Starred Review* Gr. 8-11. "I have seen the future again, and it is death. I can no longer pretend it is my imagination." As a young child, Alexandra (Sasha) saw that her friend would die. Now, at 17, her premonitions, always of death, have returned. It is 1915, and as World War I rages on, Sasha yearns to do something useful, like her father, a respected doctor in Brighton, England. Then her abstract terrors of war become immediate: one brother is killed; the other joins the army and disappears to France. In nightmares, Sasha sees his murder. Desperate to save him, she joins a volunteer nursing corps, hoping to find him on the battlefields. A few plot elements, such as Sasha's bond with a similarly clairvoyant soldier, feel contrived. But readers will be haunted by the unusually powerful, visceral view of war's horrors--the ruined landscapes of mud and wire, the gore and stench of mutilated bodies--in which the real and the supernatural are inextricably linked. In Sasha's compelling, urgent narrative, Sedgwick skillfully connects young peoples' struggles for power and self-determination with the deepest questions about fate, free will, and the meaning of patriotism. For more fiction about World War I, suggest the titles included in the Read-alikes "The War to End All Wars," in Booklist's November 1, 2001, issue. Gillian Engberg
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