I Had Seen Castles

The horrors of war and the necessity of peace become clear as John Dante looks back fifty years to his World War II experiences when, as a seventeen year old, he was torn between his patriotic fervor and his pacifist girlfriend. By the Newbery Medalist for Missing May.

Newbery Medalist Rylant has always let her readers slip easily into her characters' hearts and souls. Never before, however, has she so successfully portrayed the thoughts and emotions of a character as she has here. From the very first page, the reader feels like John Dante: 17, idealistic and itching for life to begin--a life outside of Pittsburgh and preferably one that includes Europe and castles. This engaging and utterly believable protagonist gets his new life, but through experiencing the shock of the attack on Pearl Harbor, enlisting in the army to avenge his country, falling in love with a beautiful, singular girl named Ginny, undergoing the hell that is war and discovering how its brutal reality can change so many lives forever. Rylant's story is heartbreaking in its honesty; her controlled, elegant prose lends poignancy to the story's emotional depth. The volume is deceptively slim; this finely drawn novel projects emotional truths to rival those of Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front . A love story, a coming-of-age tale, a book with a passionate anti-war message, I Had Seen Castles is not to be missed. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

John Dante is so enmeshed in WW II's patriotic fever that he can hardly wait for his 18th birthday, in 1942, to enlist. Meanwhile, his sister, stricken with empathy and concern, is engaged to two soldiers and pregnant by a third; Dad, a nuclear physicist, is called from Pittsburgh to California for secret research; and John falls sweetly, ardently in love with pretty Ginny, who urges him to become a conscientious objector. To John, her fervent pacifism is incomprehensible; but as he endures active combat, without relief, until 1945, stereotypes give way to the reality of the enemy's humanity, and Ginny's ideas become clear. Still, after his long immersion in horror, John never communicates with her again--until a message at the end of this novel, narrated in 1992 when he's a retired professor in Canada: ``I want you to know that I am really alive. And I still love you.'' Yet John has not been ``alive'' as he might have been: a lifelong solitary, he was even driven from his home by the war (``I could not stay in America because America had not suffered''). Excising all but the essential explanations (we never learn how Ginny became a CO) to focus on John's spiritual journey and the events that shape it, Rylant depicts--with some irony and much insight and compassion--the tragedy of young men putting aside their true selves (``We were the ghosts of boys and we had come to believe in nothing but each other'') to meet war's terrible demands. A brief tale, in wonderfully spare language and imagery, with a poignant love story and an unexpectedly quiet, melancholy conclusion. (Fiction. 12+) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.