Goodnight Mister Tom

Product Information

The ALSC Public Awareness and Advocacy committee challenges YOU to reach out and make connections to someone outside your network this year. I just can’t imagine what it must have been like for all those children who were sent away at the beginning of WWII, to live with total strangers. The second half of the book takes on serious issues of child abuse/neglect, the horrors and losses of war, and the grieving process. Brought up in terrible poverty, Willie is terribly shy, and totally unprepared for village life - but the gruff-but-gentle 'Mister Tom' quickly takes him under his wing. If you want to give this to your children to read, it is important you know what happens in the story, but if you’re reading the book for yourself and prefer the suspense, don’t read any further.

What I did learn from this novel is that the countryside is so much more superior than the city, but for the stupidest reason in the world. As he observed it tumble and fall between the wood and hot coke, it occurred to him that strength was quite different from toughness and that being vulnerable wasn’t the same as being weak. Ask the children to think about which items in Mr Tom's kitchen would be powered by electricity now. Tom Oakley is a gentle, patient man and seems instinctively to know how to deal with William’s problems, such as his persistent bed-wetting, which he handles with calm and grace.And these little moments of Zach spouting his signature phrase touched my heart at how it added such levity to the seriousness of the scene.

He quickly realises how fragile his young charge is and when William reveals, quite innocently, the way his mother has treated him, Tom is shocked but also determined that he will show him a different kind of life. It was for their own safety, of course, London was too dangerous, one of the prime targets for Hitlers bombing campaign, so the relative safety of country villages was thought to be the answer. The children are then ‘evacuated’ to the Museum’s traditional ‘Village Green’ where they find themselves billeted either with Mr Tom Oakley, or at school with Mrs Hartridge or visiting Mrs Brant (an inferred character from the story).

They would learn a lot about life during WWII, you could talk about what it takes to make a family, how to overcome the difficulties life throws at you, and both of you could enjoy a good story and a fun read. A book with a cover deemed “boring” by children is going to live a sad life in the library, a life of watching other (perhaps lesser) books get checked out thanks to their snazzy, eye-catching covers while it sits on the shelf, eventually getting weeded due to low circulation. The characters are endearing and the story engrossing, highlighting the horror of war, and the joy that can be obtained from simple things. Whatever platitudes we spout about judging books by their covers, the truth is almost everyone does just that.

When he is told his mother killed herself, he has no idea why someone would want to do that, but then forgets about her a chapter later, so obviously doesn’t care. I think there should be more black characters in fiction, it’s overrun with straight, white, able-bodied American or English males, you know the type, and a break is welcome as the majority of people in the world do not fit into that group, but please do not change your character’s ethnicity halfway through the novel because they get a tan. He had such a transformation in character that it was great to see how he gradually picked up the town accent and Zach’s phrases and smiled more.Unfortunately, Willie’s mentally unstable Mother has other ideas, she want him back with her, but Tom’s intuition tells him all isn’t well, and ultimately, he is forced to make a desperate decision. William is thin, sickly and covered in bruises, a timid, frightened character with poor literacy for his age. It also involves Willie stealing his dead friend’s bike, which just shows what sort of a person he is. Encourage the children to predict, make a hypothesis, create, test and amend a glove that will work a touch pad or touch screen without being removed. As a young man, he lost his wife and their baby to scarlatina, a loss that affected him so deeply that he became almost a recluse, living in a small cottage beside the village graveyard with his dog Sam.