Peter in Peril by Helen Bate
Meet Peter. He hasn't got a brilliant life, by modern standards – always getting into trouble, and playing some form of football with coat buttons, but with a loving nanny and parents. The trouble is that he is living in Budapest, and while Peter understands nothing about the outside world's problems as yet, he is about to see what happens when the Nazis take control. And, in these graphic novel-styled pages, so are we…
| Peter in Peril by Helen Bate | |
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| Category: Children's Non-Fiction | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: A very worthwhile, but not brilliant, look at a child in the Hungarian Holocaust. | |
| Buy? Maybe | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 48 | Date: September 2016 |
| Publisher: Otter-Barry Books | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9781910959572 | |
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I don't think I realised the Nazis only really had control of Budapest for a year or so, but that is enough time to cause nightmares citywide. Of course, these pages are all from Peter's point of view, so he can't explain things scientifically like the average historian. But from what he conveys it seems Peter survived two round-ups, swapped his nice home for several different places of asylum, both official and otherwise, and had only a colouring book as a stable entity around him, what with different family members being present or absent.
This is definitely a worthy entry to the non-fiction shelves for the very young. It's not a complete full-on biography, however. We never learn more than Peter's first name, and although there are photos of the relevant main characters at the end, I got the sense more could have been done to drill into us the veracity of the events. I say it's a graphic novel in appearance, for it is very much cartoonish in style – we get several boxes full of nothing but the narrative text per page, but we also get several boxes with quick snaps of dialogue to dramatise everything. However I found the dialogue equally cartoonish, and on the whole pointless, and soon switched off reading it. If anything it got in the way too much, and spoilt the flow which wasn't perfect enough due to the order of reading the boxes not being clear at times.
What was clear, even with all portrayals of horror taken from the page, was that these were monumental events, and patently horrific. There's a great effect given to a lot of these panels by our artist, that adds a sort of grimy splotching, easily evoking the darkness and mood of the times. Beyond that, I found the book easily managed to convey what it wanted, but didn't quite latch on to the modern parallels available. It's about Peter in Peril, and not any other child. That, and the fact that it serves a young audience very well but a young audience in a small window of age, suggests to me this will get more use from being on a school shelf than in a home. It's a non-scary but still evocative primer for the fact that you didn't have to live in Germany to suffer at the hands of Nazis.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
Tony Robinson's Weird World of Wonders - World War II shows us the greater picture of those times.
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