The Letter Home - Hardcover

Decker, Timothy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1932425500 ISBN 13: 9781932425505

Publisher: Front Street, 2005

Synopsis

Although a World War I medic's letter home to his son is written to carefully describe what he does and what he sees, the stark and beautiful drawings depict more fully what the letter only hints at.

About this title

About the Authors

Timothy Decker has a degree in Fine Art with a concentration in drawing. He spent several years engaged in large-format and landscape photography. His work has appeared in various exhibitions. He traveled extensively until 2004, when he settled in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, and began teaching writing to young adults. The Letter Home is his first book.

Timothy Decker has a degree in Fine Art with a concentration in drawing. He spent several years engaged in large-format and landscape photography. His work has appeared in various exhibitions. He traveled extensively until 2004, when he settle

Timothy Decker has a degree in Fine Art with a concentration in drawing. He spent several years engaged in large-format and landscape photography. His work has appeared in various exhibitions. He traveled extensively until 2004, when he settled in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, and began teaching writing to young adults. The Letter Homeis his first book.

Reviews

Grade 6 Up–This spare, somber picture book is best suited to older students or adults as readers must have some background knowledge of World War I to comprehend it. Careful attention to the black-and-white, pen-and-ink illustrations is required in order to understand the details that are not spelled out in the slight text. The title page features a picture of old-fashioned twin-wing airplanes. A banner in the corner says, 1918 Europe. The story begins with an illustration of a man writing a letter. It reads, I did not want to write to you until I could say that I would be home soon. His descriptions are brief but emotion-filled. As the book progresses, readers learn that he is encapsulating his entire wartime experience in this one letter. They see the journey across a great body of water, then soldiers marching with packs. The illustrations show fortifications with barbed wire and foxholes. The boredom and anxiety of waiting are both conveyed. A signal bird finally brings the long-awaited news–It ends, 11:00 a.m. 11/11. A boat passes the Statue of Liberty, providing the clue that the man is returning home. The final image shows a boy holding a letter beside the still-open mailbox as a man in a soldiers uniform appears before him. A thoughtful reminiscence thats sure to spark discussion.–Lucinda Snyder Whitehurst, St. Christophers School, Richmond, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Decker's debut, styled as an illustrated letter from an American medic to his child at the end of WW I, indicates the difficulties of explaining war to a young audience. Scant background is provided—readers never hear who is fighting whom, or why—but the title page vaguely announces a setting (Europe, 1918), and the letter-writer is recognizable by his Red Cross armband and lack of a rifle. Terse words and pictures of icy weather convey his physical coldness and raw boredom, although he rarely speaks of his medical duties. One pen-and-ink drawing appears per page, a postcard-size rectangle captioned with an oblique statement about what he has endured. The medic remembers his infantry's march to the front lines, passing beneath American and French flags. On a stark, barbed-wire-strewn battlefield ("Some nights were alive with fireworks"), a soldier peeks out of a sandbagged trench as white explosions crack the sky. "Sometimes we played hide and seek," says the medic ingenuously, as he and others evade shadowy armed figures. The soldiers' bland faces, with no mouths, eyes turned down at the corners, convey dejection, and some details recall antiwar novels such as Slaughterhouse-Five ("Hendricks found a woman's coat. We all laughed.... He said that it kept him warm"). Yet the medic's "prayer" as his ship glides toward the Statue of Liberty ("Compassion as action to ease the pain of the world") remains as enigmatic as the situation. The retrospective "letter," which alludes to death while remaining nonjudgmental, implies the painful realities that adults try to withhold from children. All ages. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Front Street
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1932425500
• ISBN 13: 9781932425505
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 32