Seventeen-year-old Charlie Wilcox has returned at last to his tiny Newfoundland fishing village, Brigus, bearing the physical and emotional scars of his experiences in the Great War. In the three years since he first stowed away on a troopship in 1916, he’s crossed France as a volunteer in hospital aid stations, survived the trenches and a near-fatal bout of trench fever, watched friends die senselessly, and grown up too quickly.

Author Sharon McKay begins with a four-page plot synopsis of her earlier title Charlie Wilcox, which is helpful for those who haven’t read the first book, but seems overly long for a synopsis. Charlie’s return to Brigus and recounting of his war experiences to his girlfriend Claire happen over a period of two days in 1919. At its best, Charlie Wilcox’s Great War gives readers a sense of what life must have been like for a youth plunged into the midst of this horrific conflict. The descriptions of trench life are exceptionally powerful.

But the novel falters in its sensibilities and its development of Charlie’s character. It’s hard to believe that Charlie would be able to spill the burden of his wartime experiences to Claire just a day after returning home, knowing as we do that so many First World War veterans found their war experiences too painful ever to talk about. We’re told often how war has aged Charlie yet his face on the book’s cover remains that of a young boy. The pace of the novel is a little frenetic, pushed more often by chronology than by action. McKay’s description of the trenches as having scarred the face of France like “a moonscape” is one of the too-modern perspectives that riddle her narrative. While a bibliography of Canadian books about the First World War is especially useful for teachers, the book’s glossary seems muddled, packed with too much extra information. Unfortunately, Charlie Wilcox’s second title doesn’t live up to the promise of his first.