Fifteen-year-old Jim Hay starts his diary on Aug. 4, 1914, the day Britain enters the Great War. Thrilled his father is going to fight, he wishes he was older and could join up too. He fills his diary with newspaper clippings, postcards, and letters, and hungrily recounts news of the various battles. But his boyish enthusiasm pales when his father dies less than a month into the war and his mother spirals into depression, then sudden death. Orphaned and underage, Jim feels obliged to carry on in his father’s memory and joins up in December 1914.

He recounts his battalion’s engagements at the front, the deaths of friends, and his encounter with war poet Isaac Rosenberg (the book’s title is taken from a poem by another war poet, Laurence Binyon). But a year and a half of fighting begins to take its toll on Jim and after the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, his life takes a devastating, ultimately tragic, turn.

John Wilson has neatly conjured up the interior life of a young man who painfully discovers the real horrors of war in this extremely evocative novel. The diary format creates an intimacy between Jim and the reader, conveying his emotional reactions to war especially well. The entries – particularly the terse one-liners – give us a sense of war’s chaos, confusion, and monotony. Wilson uses newspaper headlines (some real, some fictionalized), army memos, and letters to great effect in advancing his narrative. But it’s the novel’s moving treatment of deserters that makes And in the Morning such a unique addition to young adult fiction about the First World War.

Wilson says in his author’s notes that Jim Hay is a fictional character. But the book is dedicated to a real Private Hay, who, it turns out, was related to Wilson through marriage (a call to the publisher revealed this). Why didn’t Wilson mention this real Private Hay in his notes? I like to know about the real-life sources or inspiration for historical fiction, and I think teen readers do, too. This minor quibble aside, And in the Morning joins other outstanding novels about the First World War, such as Charlie Wilcox and Flying Geese, as an invaluable resource for libraries and classrooms.