Rabbit, Soldier, Angel, Thief

Katrina Nannestad's Rabbit, Soldier, Angel, Thief is a Second World War story for 10 year olds told by a boy who has stopped talking.

What happens

Sasha is ten. He's in a Red Army hospital in Berlin, bandaged from head to legs, and he hasn't said a word in months.

What he does instead is steal. Buttons off a doctor's coat. Six spoons. A dead beetle. Twelve matchboxes, each one filled with ash. He hides the lot in a hole in his mattress.

The nurses adore him. A one-armed sergeant forgives him for stabbing a pillow at two in the morning to get at the feathers.

Nobody, including Sasha, knows why he needs these things.

Then a doctor brings him a bunch of wild flowers she found growing in a bombed-out garden, and something shifts. He lays his stolen treasures out on the blanket. And he starts to talk.

The book he tells is the story of the objects. A village in Russia in 1942, full of cherry blossom and geese and a mother who embroiders a new flower on her headscarf every week. A big sister of twelve. A black cat called Ushanka who sleeps on his head.

Then tanks, and soldiers who look to a six year old exactly like princes.

Sasha's voice is the thing here. He's little, and he tells you what he sees without understanding it, which somehow makes everything land harder. When the grown-ups start pretending that rifles and bread and secret notes simply aren't real, he joins in the game with tremendous pride and thinks it's brilliant fun.

You will be a page ahead of him almost the whole way. That's deliberate, and it's very hard to put down.

You need to know how dark this gets, because the flip from warm to unbearable is sudden. A German officer questions Sasha in his own kitchen. His sister is hit across the head and ends up under the table. Then the soldiers take everyone out into the street, Sasha runs, and there's shooting.

When he comes back the next morning his entire village has been burned. His mother, his sister, his neighbours, his two best friends, all of them. That's the ashes in the matchboxes.

None of the killing happens where you can see it. That doesn't make it any gentler, and it arrives about a third of the way through rather than at the end.

This is not one to hand over without knowing what's in it. A child who found War Horse hard going will find this harder.

But for a reader who has started asking real questions about the war, it's extraordinary. The kindness in the hospital scenes is as strong as the grief, and Sasha is very funny in between.

What to read next

If they can take this one, Morris Gleitzman's Once is in the library too. Felix is in a Polish orphanage in the same year, understands even less than Sasha does, and explains everything happening around him with the wrong story.