War Horse

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

At the outbreak of World War One, Joey, young Albert's beloved horse, is sold to the cavalry and shipped to France. He's soon caught up in enemy fire, and fate takes him on an extraordinary odyssey, serving on both sides before finding himself alone in no man's land.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Joey, young Albert's beloved horse, is sold to the cavalry and shipped to France. He's soon caught up in enemy fire, and fate takes him on an extraordinary odyssey, serving on both sides before finding himself alone in no man's land. But Albert cannot forget Joey and, although still not old enough to enlist, he embarks on a treacherous mission to the trenches to find him and bring him home.

Narrated from an unusual perspective, Michael Morpurgo's classic novel vividly brings to life the sufferings of animals caught up in human warfare.

War Horse has been adapted by the National Theatre to become a hit play and is now being made into a major motion picture by Steven Spielberg.

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Reviews provided by Syndetics

School Library Journal Review

Gr 4-8-World War I is described from the point of view of Joey, a handsome farm horse. When Joey is forced to leave his beloved master and serve on the Western Front, he undergoes months of grueling battlefield action. Based on fact, this moving story about the love between a horse and a young man is a sharp indictment of war. Audio version available from Scholastic. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Like Morpurgo's Private Peaceful (2004), this searing World War I novel reveals the unspeakable slaughter of soldiers on all sides fighting against people who are just like them. The story is told by an English farm horse, Joey, and, as in Cynthia Kadahota's Cracker! The Best Dog in Vietnam (2007), the first-person narrative blends the animal's physical experience with what men say. On the farm, Joey has close ties to Albert, who is too young to join up when his dad first sells Joey to the army. Charging into battle under machine-gun fire, Joey is captured by the Germans, who train him to haul ambulances and guns. His reunion with Albert in battle is sentimental and contrived, but the viewpoint brings close the fury of the thundering guns, the confusion, and the kindness of enemies who come together in No Man's Land to save the wounded horse. Joey's ability to understand the language wherever he is--England, France, Germany--reinforces the novel's antiwar message, and the terse details speak eloquently about peace. --Hazel Rochman Copyright 2007 Booklist

Horn Book Review

Joey is a fine farm horse sold for cavalry use in World War I. Through Joey's Black Beauty-esque narration, readers learn of the futility of cavalry against machine guns; the loss of Joey's companion, Topthorn; and Joey's reunion with the farm boy who loves him. At times deeply affecting, the story balances the horror with moments of respite and care. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Book Review

In effect, a horse's eye view of the First World War--heart-rending in Black Beauty tradition, anti-war like All Quiet. . . , certainly unusual and dramatic. The spirited young stallion is purchased by a Devon farmer, vicious when drunk, to thwart a despised neighbor; he is protected, however, by the farmer's gentle young son Albert, then 13, who names him Joey (to rhyme with old farm horse Zoey), tends him fondly, and trains him--""inside a week,"" after a paternal threat--to pull a plow. (""For [Zoey's] sake and for my own sake, for Albert's, too, I leaned my weight into my collar and began to pull."") Rumbles of war, then the reality: Joey is sold to the British cavalry, distraught Albert is turned away as too young, Joey acquires a new protector in Captain Nicholls and a new friend in majestic Topthorn. Following Captain Nicholls' death Joey and Topthorn are the sole horse survivors of what will be the war's last cavalry charge--clearly insane in the face of machine guns and barbed wire. Now German ""prisoners,"" they are first utilized to pull ambulance wagons (under the reluctant aegis of a German aristocrat-horselover); then, happily, put to farm work by an elderly Frenchman and his lovable granddaughter Emilie; then recalled, to haul guns, by other, sterner Germans. (Says insightful Joey: ""It was not that they were cruel men, but just that they seemed driven now by a fearful compulsion. . . . "") Staunch Topthorn dies, and Joey finds himself alone in No Man's Land, approached by a single Briton and a single German. . . who toss a coin--which comes up heads for the Briton. At the veterinary hospital, he is reunited (surprise) with Albert; then, saved by an all-hands effort from tetanus. But, incredibly, worse is still to come: at war's end, the war-veteran horses are auctioned off, and Albert and his buddies are almost outbid for Joey by the local butcher. . . when little Emilie's old farmer-grandfather steps in. . . not to rescue Joey for her but to present Joey to Albert in her memory. (That sentimental nadir is followed, fortunately, by brief word that Albert's soon-to-be-wife ""never did take to me, nor I to her."") Despite relentless English and German anti-war rumination, and Joey's own supra-equine understandings: some distinct glimpses of how it was to be a war-horse--in addition to that thundering melodrama. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.