War Horse

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Before the Steven Spielberg film, before the National Theatre production, there was the classic children's novel...

In the deadly chaos of the First World War, one horse witnesses the reality of battle from both sides of the trenches. Bombarded by artillery, with bullets knocking riders from his back, Joey tells a powerful story of the truest friendships surviving in terrible times. One horse has the seen the best and the worst of humanity. The power of war and the beauty of peace. This is his story.



War Horse was adapted by Steven Spielberg as a major motion picture with Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson, and Benedict Cumberbatch. The National Theatre production opened in 2007 and has enjoyed successful runs in the West End and on Broadway.



A great way of introducing young readers to the realities of WWI. Look out for Morpurgo's other war fiction including Friend or Foe, Waiting for Anya, King of the Cloud Forests and An Eagle in the Snow.



War Horse is a story of universal suffering for a universal audience by a writer who 'has the happy knack of speaking to both child and adult readers' (The Guardian).



Michael Morpurgo has written more than one hundred books for children and won the Whitbread Award, the Smarties Award, the Circle of Gold Award, the Children's Book Award and has been short-listed for the Carnegie Medal four times.

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.