Goodnight Mister Tom

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War has not yet broken out, though it seems inevitable, and children are being evacuated as a precautionary measure in anticipation of Nazi bombing. You come to love the characters in the small village, and as the book lasts for most of the war, you also begin admiring their courage and every day heroics. My favourite character is Zach as I liked how posh he was and how different he was to all the other characters. Michelle has written the book and lyrics for three more musicals and eight other novels, including award-winning Back Home and Just Henry, which won the Costa Award.

Such would be the ignoble fate of one particular book in my library were it not for the fact that someone whose judgement I trusted implicitly once gave it to me as a birthday present. Michelle Magorian was born in Portsmouth, England, and grew up in such diverse places as Perth, Australia, and Singapore. 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. Magorian has worked with numerous touring and repertory companies, and spent two years training as a mime at Marcel Marceau's world-renowned L'Ecole Intenationale de Mime in Paris, France. When World War II thrusts scrawny evacuee Willie Beech into the care of a gruff old man, an unlikely bond flourishes between them.

Young Willie Beech is evacuated to the countryside as Britain stands on the brink of the Second World War.

Tom, William, and Zach enjoy a holiday at the seaside village of Salmouth, where the landlady of their cottage mistake William as Tom's son.Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian is the unforgettable story of young Willie Beech, evacuated to the country as Britain stands on the brink of the Second World War. Though initially distant, Tom is moved after discovering William's home life and treats him with kindness. The widower he stays with, Tom Oakley, is gruff and blunt and has shunned company ever since his wife died in childbirth forty years ago.

This book had been on my radar for years; I think my son read it in school so we have had a copy around the house for some time. Willie Beech an 8 year old boy severely deprived and abused by his psychotic religious crank mother, is evacuated from his home in London on the eve of the Second World War to the English countryside town of Little Weirwold where he is billeted with the semi-reclusive elderly villager Tom Oakley. After attending the Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance and Marcel Marceau's L'École Internationale de Mime in Paris, she wrote between acting jobs and on Sundays when rehearsing and performing musicals and plays six days and six nights a week (as Mikki Magorian). It made me feel safe to know that even when we're at the worst places in our lives that there are still possibilities. It’s about how a man who once lost so much is at last given the chance to show what a truly good man he is, what a wonderful Father he could have been if fate hadn’t robbed him of that opportunity so many years before.Neither he nor Willie could ever have predicted the journey they will go on together - nor the unbreakable bond that will be formed. Feedback from visiting schools tells us that, once children have taken part in the day they are able to relate both to the characters and their ‘1940s’ lives with real ease: this new awareness is reflected within writing of their own and quality outcomes in all aspects of literacy – creative story writing, poetry and drama – are the result. 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.