Writing from the point-of-view of a young boy evacuated from England during the Second World War, James Heneghan tells an exciting, suspenseful story of danger, survival, and friendship. Heneghan’s characters are fictional, but the novel centres on an actual event – the mid-Atlantic sinking of the passenger ship City of Benares by a German U-boat. The irony of the historical situation pervades Heneghan’s story: parents send their unwilling children away to keep them safe from the air raids, only to make them victims of one of the most horrifying crimes of the war. While, as Heneghan tells us in an author’s note on the factual basis of the novel, only 19 of the 100 children on board the ship survived, Jamie and two other children from his school are among the lucky ones. For anyone familiar with the story, the sinister impact of the novel’s title is emphasized in the jacket picture of a boy looking up at the massive prow of a ship and its name, City of Benares. The confusion and suffering of wartime, where even well-intentioned measures such as evacuating children to Canada can lead to disaster, is powerfully conveyed in the later chapters of Wish Me Luck, in contrast to the naive enthusiasm of its opening, when the young boys greet the prospect of battle and danger.

Both before and after the central event of the sinking of the ship, the novel focuses on Jamie’s changing attitude to another boy, Tom Bleeker. Raised in an abusive home, Tom is surly and awkward, but the reader is encouraged to recognize – before Jamie himself does – the kindness and courage masked by Tom’s rough manner. Twelve-year-old Jamie frequently expresses disgust with emotionalism and sentimentality, and Heneghan appropriately shows Jamie’s eventual admiration and concern for Tom through his actions rather than words. Jamie and Tom come from Irish families living in Liverpool, and the novel’s early scenes of family and neighbourhood life are well realized, as is the life of the children aboard the ship, with its unaccustomed luxuries. Though the quality of writing is not at the same standard, Wish Me Luck does bear comparison with some of the outstanding children’s novels about the war and the evacuees, such as Kit Pearson’s The Sky is Falling and Michelle Magourlan’s Goodnight, Mr. Tom.