Maybe

Morris Gleitzman's Maybe is a wartime story for 11 year olds that begins after the fighting has stopped, and it is a long way into Felix's life rather than the start of it.

What happens

It is 1946. Felix is fourteen, he wears glasses, and he is walking down a dusty road in Poland trying very hard to think about butterflies.

He is doing this because Gabriek has told him to stop worrying. Gabriek is nearly forty and is the closest thing Felix has to a father. Anya is a couple of years older than Felix, heavily pregnant, riding in the cart and telling him he has a face like a Nazi's bum. Henk the donkey is pulling the lot of them and has been for nineteen days.

They are going to Gabriek's farm to build a life with no fear in it. The farmhouse is not there any more. The Nazis burned it down before the war ended, so they will be starting with the ashes.

The reason for the hurry is a man called Zliv. His brother was killed, he holds Felix responsible, and he has told anyone who will listen that he will not stop until he has cut the boy's heart out. Felix has never seen his face. That is the worst part, because it means every stranger might be him.

What makes these books so readable is Felix himself. He tells you everything in a chatty, hopeful, slightly sideways voice, and he keeps trying to look on the bright side. This year has the best fragrant breezes, he decides, probably because there are fewer dead bodies about. He says it cheerfully. You are the one who has to sit with it.

Which brings me to what you need to know before handing this over. The fighting has stopped, but the wreckage it left is on every page and Gleitzman does not tidy it away. A teenager is pregnant by a soldier who is dead. Anya keeps a loaded gun under her blanket. There is a passing, horrible story about what Zliv once did to a girlfriend with a knife. None of it is dwelt on and none of it is softened either. For a child who is ready, it is extraordinary. For a child who is not, it will be too much, and the gentle chatty narrator is exactly what makes it land so hard.

One more thing. Felix refers back constantly to the orphanage, the forest and the people he has lost, and none of that is explained here. Your reader will not be lost, but they will not feel it properly either.

What to read next

So start where he starts. In the first book, Once, Felix is much younger, hiding in a mountain orphanage, and he still believes his parents are coming back for him.