Keely Hutton's new novel is Secret Soldiers.From the author's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: How did you come up with the idea for Secret Soldiers, and for your character Thomas?Visit Keely Hutton's website.
A: The idea for my upcoming middle grade novel, Secret Soldiers, started with some confusion while I was binge-watching the BBC show Peaky Blinders three years ago. The main character, Tommy Shelby, suffers from PTSD due to his time as a soldier in World War I.
My editor and I had agreed that my next book should be in the same vein as my debut novel Soldier Boy, so I’d been researching wars and child soldiers. I hadn’t found anything that really grabbed my attention until I watched Tommy Shelby’s flashbacks, which showed him fighting in tunnels.
A quick Google search revealed that thousands of sappers and miners tunneled beneath the battlefields of the Great War to undermine the enemy’s position and break the brutal stalemate of trench warfare. Fascinated, I researched whether any child soldiers fought in World War I and was shocked to discover that over a quarter of a million underage British boys...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: Soldier Boy.
My Book, The Movie: Soldier Boy.
Writers Read: Keely Hutton (July 2017).
--Marshal Zeringue