My Mother's Eyes

A fifteen-year-old Australian farm boy lies about his age to enlist to war and is caught up in the horrors of World War I in Egypt and on the Western Front, where 5,500 Australian troops were lost in two days at Fromelles alone. This boy s story in this unique, stirring picture book is based on true stories of the twenty-three teenage soldiers one only fourteen who fought with the Australian army in World War I, as recorded at the Australian War Memorial (their names among a list of 60,000 Australian soldiers killed in that war). The author s grandfather was a boy soldier who, unlike the hero of the book, did survive to return home. Told in the boy s own simple language and with extracts from his letters home, the story is extremely moving and evocative of the real tragedy of that worst of all wars.