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Recommended reading ages 10-14 years.
1915: Wounds of War is a moving and informative story about the experiences of the New Zealand nurses who served during World War I. It is a mix of fact and fiction with invented characters taking part in real events in real places. The warmth and caring portrayed make it suitable for young readers without shielding them from the realities of war.
Most of the book is written in the third person. There are two main characters, the young New Zealand nurse Mel Burlace and her cousin Harriet Mills. One or other is the focus of each chapter. The book also features letters between the two women. These first-person descriptions bring the characters to life and break up the form of the book. Readers also learn about what is happening to the male soldiers through the voices of the nurses’ patients and relations.
Maps, a time line, a glossary and a bibliography assist readers in understanding the events and the language of the time.
About the Kiwi author
Like Harriet in Wounds of War, Diana Menefy trained to be a nurse at Christchurch hospital. She grew up in Riccarton, near Christchurch, and later married a young farmer. Together, they farmed in Whangamata, Helensville and Tapuhi and raised their three children. Diana’s writing career began in the late 1970s, when she wrote several stories and articles that were published in the School Journal and New Zealand Farmer. She enrolled in a correspondence course in writing and developed a passion for children’s literature, which in 2001, she made the topic of her master’s degree in education. Diana has since written fiction and non-fiction educational readers for companies such as Learning Media, and she has also written two junior novels, River Crossing (2001) and Shadow of the Boyd (2010), which won the LIANZA Esther Glen Medal in 2011 and was a finalist for the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards. In addition, Diana has put her love of history to use by writing historical non-fiction material for adults.
