CHICOPEE — Local author Jacqueline Lynch recently published “Children’s Wartime Adventure Novels — The Silent Generation’s Vicarious Experience of World War II.”
The book is a collection revisiting middle grade and young adult books from the Cherry Ames series, to the Dave Dawson series, Ann Barlett, “Meet the Malones” and a host of other stories that brought the war home to kids too young to fight it but who were acutely aware of its tragedies, triumphs, anxieties and grim realities.
Lynch also discussed the book and said, “It’s an analysis of children’s books about World War II that were written during World War II for middle grade and teenagers. Many of them are series books, they have several books in a series and there are a few standalones but they all have to do with the war. The boys books tended to have a lot of action in them with young men who were in the military and the girls books had to do with nursing and some military too.”
Lynch said she remembers reading some of these books and always wanted to put a collection together.
She said, “I had read some of these books many, many years ago when I was a child but it was about 20 years ago when I was kind of reintroduced to that genre through some collector friends of mine, and it occurred to me if I gathered some of these books together it might make an interesting article and then the more I got together the more I realized this was going to be a book not an article.”
It took Lynch a long time to collect all the books because most of them are out of print and hard to find along with working on other books.
She said, “It’s nothing I worked on exclusively because I have a lot of other projects, a lot of other things on the fire, but whenever I could manage to devote some time to it and whenever I would find a new thing I was hunting for, it was something I would always go back to, and I always intended to finish it.”
Now that the book is complete, Lynch talked about the process and her thoughts on how it came out.
She said, “It was a fun book to write and I think for people who are not aware of that time period very much, it will be a real eye opener, but for people who read some of these books as kids, it will be a nice trip down memory lane for them. It’s quite nostalgic and quite funny at parts. They might like to relive some of the memories of their youth.”
Not only does this book serve as a potential nostalgic read for some people, it can also teach history for those not around during this time period.
Lynch explained, “There are a lot of ways to explore pop culture and history. We can do it through names and dates or we can do it through music or movies but children’s literature is very revealing I think of this era and time. Some of these kids had to grow up awfully fast and it reflects in these stories.”
More about Lynch and her books can be found at jacquelinetlynch.com.
When talking about her journey, Lynch talked about what she enjoys most about writing.
She said, “I’ve been writing since I was a teenager. I think it’s just something you’re drawn to, the way anyone is to things they enjoy like sports, acting. It’s just something you decide you want to do early on and you’re drawn to. Some writers stick to one thing, one genre. I kind of like to do a little of everything. I like fiction and non-fiction and when it comes to fiction, I like series genre. So, I don’t really stick to one thing, I write what I like to write and that makes me happy.”
Lynch also has a mystery series set in New England in the early 1950s and another about what it was like for the towns that had to be demolished for the Quabbin Reservoir.
