Goodnight Mister Tom

Product Information

The child reading this book will get to learn the difference between when an adult misbehaves and when an adult actually cares.

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. Even through the horrors facing people in WWII London we are shown the true love that can happen from makeshift families like that made up of Mr. The day begins with an experience of the Blitz – we deliberately make this noisy and monotonous so that it doesn’t glamorise what was an uncomfortable and unpleasant aspect of war time life in the cites.Michelle Magorian was born in Portsmouth, England, and grew up in such diverse places as Perth, Australia, and Singapore.

An absorbing interest in the history and nature of children's books led her to try her hand at writing for younger readers. Willie is devastated, but again, gets over it after a chapter, so obviously didn’t care all that much. This story deals with war, abuse and hate, endurance, poverty, the twisting of religion to justify the abuse of others, the hopelessness of children who have never known love, as well as the joy of giving love. 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.Willie Beach finds himself living with Tom, a man in his sixties, a widower who has lived alone for a long time, but who fits the bill for the kind of person Willie’s mother has requested her son be put with.

She was also a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal from the British librarians, recognising the year's best English-language children's book published in the UK. His mother, a single parent, is an extremely religious woman who has controlled William through severe physical punishment and has kept him from school because she believes it to be a godless place. War has not yet broken out, though it seems inevitable, and children are being evacuated as a precautionary measure in anticipation of Nazi bombing. The children think about existing objects which have had a motor added for example the toothbrush or the whisk and consider how motorisation has made those objects more efficient. I think, on a meta-level, it was to make sure the novel was filled with tragedy, as Willie is left ‘traumatized’ and the baby dies.Overall i think Goodnight Mister Tom is a very heartwarming and emotional story that will leave you in tears. It's the story of young Willie Beech, evacuated to the country as Britain stands on the brink of the Second World War. A lonely and deprived child, he finds himself living with the reclusive, gruff old widower, Thomas Oakley. 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.