This Means War! [Hardcover]

AS a teacher and children's writer,I enjoyed this novel. Set in the early 1960's it gives a good feeling for life in the US in the early 1960's. I was girl, the age of Juliette, when the Cuban Missle crisis happened. And it gave a good protrayal of the feelings of children at that time.

This story revolves around the few days the Cuban missals crisis played out, but at the same time Juliette is dealing with age old problems, parents, worried about their finacial future, an older sister o has turned into a teen-ager, and a best friend, who happens to be a boy, starts to ignore her for his new male friend. When the neighborhood bully joins up with the boys tensions between the neighborhood girls and boys escalates much the the way things between the U.S. and Russia do at the same time. Both stories are compelling making the reader want to read on and see how it is all resolved.

This season we are blessed with the publication of two tween books taking place during the early 1960s and the Cuban Missile Crisis. This Means War by Ellen Wittlinger captures what it was like to be eleven years old and worried that a nuclear war was about to take place. Juliet is growing up in the midwest, upset at just having lost her best friend, Lowell, to two "Air Force brats" that have moved in to the military base in their town. Now Lowell has two boys who he would rather hang out with than Juliet. Finally Juliet meets Patsy, whose father is a mechanic in the Air Force. The two of them seek out a way to show the boys that the girls are better than them. To do this, the boys and girls have a series of contests pitting the two groups against each other. While some of the contests are harmless, the final challenge ends up causing some real damage and endangering the lives of those involved.

Wittlinger has managed to develop a novel sharing what life in America looked like in the early 1960s. Juliet's family owns a small grocery store that is having trouble keeping up with the development of the supermarket. Families are building bomb shelters in anticipation of President Kennedy being unable to resolve Russia's aggression toward the United States on the island of Cuba. And Russia is also busily sending a man up in space.

I loved this slice of 1960s America that Wittlinger provides. This is a great historical fiction novel for tweens who are interested in this time period and the beginning of the Cold War.

Many children's first experience of peer pressure comes with the sudden expectation that boys play with boys and girls play with girls, and that anyone who fails to adhere to this standard has something wrong with them. For those who have grown up playing innocently but passionately with best friends of the opposite gender, this unexpected thrusting into the world of sexual politics can be truly traumatic.

That's the world where Juliet Klostermeyer finds herself at the beginning of THIS MEANS WAR! Juliet has been best friends with her neighbor Lowell for nearly their entire lives. Now that they're getting older, though, Lowell is spending way too much time building go-karts with the other boys whose dads are stationed at the nearby military base. He has no time for Juliet, which means that she has a lot of time on her own, to worry about all the other things going wrong in the world.

There is her older sister Caroline, of course, who seems to require more privacy --- and be bossier --- than ever. There are her parents, owners of a small downtown grocer, constantly bickering and worrying about the new supermarkets on the edge of town. And, of course, there is the far-away but ever-nearer threat of war, as the Soviet Union threatens to park nuclear weapons in Cuba, and Juliet and her classmates practice "duck and cover" drills several times a day.

Into this tense world bursts the plucky, charismatic Patsy, who has moved into the neighborhood because her dad is a mechanic for all those fighter planes lined up ready to go to war. Patsy has guts and bravery --- and she's not about to let Lowell's friends, especially the bullying Bruce Wagner, have the run of the neighborhood. So when Patsy engineers a "boys vs. girls" competition between Juliet's friends and Lowell's, everyone's on board --- at first. But just as issues on the world political stage are growing more and more tense, so are the competitions staged between the boys and girls.

Juliet is a thoughtful narrator, one who is sensitive both to world events and to the ones that affect her daily life. Her heartfelt spirituality is a refreshing aspect of her character; she often composes sincere, if awkward, prayers to God at moments of personal crisis. Her group of friends are realistic and convincing, straddling the realms of childhood, with its innocent games and challenges, and adolescence, with its romantic pressures and more serious forms of competition.

In THIS MEANS WAR!, Ellen Wittlinger has put her finger on a particular moment in many children's maturation, one that will speak to a number of readers, especially in the late primary grades. By placing these common themes of girl vs. boy politics against the backdrop of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, however, Wittlinger cleverly raises more profound questions about what it means to be an aggressor, a soldier. She encourages readers to consider what constitutes true bravery and weakness, and what these questions mean not only in the context of Juliet's particular historical moment but also in our own.

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