WWI Centenery: Two Perspectives

Seeing as today is the Centenery of the First World War, I thought I'd share one of my favourite WWI poems and a letter with you, which will hopefully illustrate the realities of both men and women during this dreadful time, through the perspectives of Madeline Ida Bedford and Wilfred Owen. 

1)

This one, I believe, satirizes the so-called 'good life' in the munitions factories that women were suppose to have appreciated and enjoyed. In reality, while they weren't faced with the horrors of the trenches, and whilst in the long term their involvement proved their capabilities and potential thus contributing to the reasons behind them gaining suffrage in 1918, women's experiences, in most cases, involved hard labour, danger, grief, loss and loneliness. Those on the Home Front deserved a voice too.

2)

 Letter from poet/soldier Wilfred Owen to his mother, Susan Owen. Click to listen to audio of letter.

Owen wrote over 500 letters to his mother through the years, until he sadly died one week before the Armistice in November 1918, aged just 25. My favourite poem of his is Anthem For Doomed Youth.

 Something that a presenter of a WWI remembrance programme said earlier caught my attention - 

"Out of a war with such brutality, that killed millions, came art, literature and music of enduring elegance " 

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BELIEVE the hype.

Excuse the state of my library copy! 

Wrote this last night:

I've just finished reading this - 5 minutes ago - and immediately felt I had to write about it.
You know when people GO ON AND ON about a book so much, that when you finally read it, yeah it's generally a good book but it's doomed to be somewhat disappointing because it can never live up to the success that surrounds it (BTW, this sort of happened with Looking For Alaska by John Green for me - it was great but I was naively expecting my life to be changed forevermore or something). It's undermined by its own well-deserved hype. What a paradox. 

Well.
This didn't happen with Wonder by R.J. Palacio. Not at all. A review by 'The Bookseller' states that 'it will make you laugh, cry and break your heart'. It's no lie. In many moments I laughed out loud, which doesn't happen with many books - little gems of humour peppered throughout, such as the unexpected Justin Bieber reference at the end, in amongst the list of great philosophers, explorers and artists. Fantastic.

With risk of sounding cliched, it really is an inspiring book that left me feeling hopeful after quite a bad day, and ready to face tomorrow as a brighter one. I'm still on a high from it in fact. I have a library copy, but maybe I'll get one for myself - just so I can flick through some of its wonderful snippets of universal wisdom when another bad day comes around. 

So, I'd just like to say: Believe the hype. It may or may not change your life. Hey, we all have different reading experiences and things that move us don't necessarily move others. You may not connect with this book at all, in fact.
But there's only one way to find out.

Danielle x

P.S. For those of you who have read it already, try The Julian Chapter,  a short e-book in the perspective of the school bully from Wonder, Julian.