5 Questions about THE WAR LANTERN and writing historical fiction for children ...

"Told through alternating narrators, this fascinating World War II novel will hook readers until the very end." --School Library Journal (Aug. 2026), STARRED REVIEW

The War Lantern is coming OCTOBER 17, 2026 from DCB Young Readers! It's my new middle grade historical fiction and is inspired by my family history in WWII. I learned so much about myself, my English family, WWII, and how to write historical fiction for children, which I've discovered is an extremely demanding genre. My research took me to my family's village in England, and to some impressive war museums and memorials.

Since the book is coming out soon, it's a good time to reflect and answer the Top 5 questions readers might ask about the book ...

1. What's THE WAR LANTERN about?

At 2:30 in the afternoon on February 27, 1941, a single German Luftwaffe Heinkel 111 bombed the Parnall Aircraft Factory in Yate, Gloucestershire, UK. It was a bold daylight "pirate raid" that killed 53 aircraft workers and injured many more. My father, aged fifteen, was working at the factory that day: he survived by diving under his lathe. His experience inspired The War Lantern. 

Author's father, 1941, age 15

The story takes place over 24-hours in hourly increments, and has three first-person teenage narrators: my father in England, a German girl, Gisele, in Nazi Germany, and an underage Royal Air Force (RAF) rear machine gunner, Tail End Charlie, also from England.

My father's narrative is about daily village life, family, and the bombing. Gisele's story takes readers into the heart of Nazi Germany when she learns that her government is going to take her little brother away for not being perfect. Overhead and way at the back of his Whitley bomber, Tail End Charlie learns hard truths about war and killing, yet remains hopeful that the war must end soon. (In reality, in February 1941 it had barely begun.)

The story explores the cost, universality, and connection of war across enemy lines, as paid by children, youth, and families. By the end of the book, readers understand that all three narrators are connected by a single event: the bombing of Parnall's. 

2. What research went into writing the book? 

Author at Imperial War
Museum Archives, 9/2023

I began my very first research for the book in 2019, seven years before publication, but the most intense research happened between 2023 and 2026. 

RAF rear gunner turret

With thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts for a generous Research and Creation grant which allowed me to travel to England and sites in Canada, my research about the bombing took me to the world-famous Imperial War Museum in London, where I read a first-hand account written by a 15-year-old volunteer fireman, Richard Ford. Since they were from the same village and the same age, my father and Richard must have known each other. 

I also viewed dozens of photographs by the war photographer Paule Vezelay, specifically her March 1941 photos of the Pucklechurch RAF Barrage Balloon camp, where my father played the drums in an RAF swing music orchestra and which figures in the book. 

While in London, I also visited the Bomber Command Memorial at Hyde Park Corner many times over the several days that I was there. It was incredibly moving: 55,000 RAF bomber crew died between 1940 and 1945, their average age was 22. 

Author at the Bomber Command
Memorial, London (2023)

Parnall’s Aircraft Factory was one of the only factories in England during WWII that manufactured machine gun turrets for RAF warplanes, like the famous Lancaster bomber which rolled off the production lines in September, 1941. The day of the Parnall's bombing they were just beginning to make turrets to fit the first Lancasters to come.

Some of my research was about that: what was the RAF like in 1941; what's a machine gun turret; how was it made; who used it; what happened on an RAF night-time bombing run? 

What was it like to be a Tail End Charlie, the rear gunner looking out into the darkness, waiting to shoot at prowling Luftwaffe fighter planes? I discovered that in a nighttime dogfight with German warplanes, the rear gunners were often the first to die.

I travelled to Chipping Sodbury, UK, the town where my father grew up. At the Yate Heritage Centre nearby, I listened to hours and hours of incredible Parnall's bombing survivor recordings in the Yate Oral History Project. 

Author at Parnall's factory site
Photo courtesy Rich McDonough

On an exclusive tour of the former Parnall’s factory site in Yate, my tour guide and I got lost in the darkness of the underground WWII infirmary and air-raid shelter. It was hard enough to remain calm on a quiet summer day in peacetime; how did they remain calm when the bombs fell? Or did panic reign?

That day held one of the most incredible moments of my life. I stood inside the factory, possibly in the very spot that my father's lathe would have stood and where he survived the bombing. I have to say that was overwhelming and sobering. Yes, I wept, although I tried to be stoic. My English tour guides were very kind, provided tissues and tea, and made allowances for this Canadian. Thank you to them!

Blue door entrance to the WWII
Parnall's Infirmary & Air raid shelter

I also visited the Canadian Heritage Warplane Museum near Hamilton, Ontario, and was given a personal guided tour of their 1945 Lancaster bomber, one of the last made in the world. I got to see the tiny, lonely space where the rear gunner sat on an RAF nighttime bombing run to Germany. The turrets were cramped, dark, freezing at 20,000 feet, lonely, and dangerous. It took a special kind of innocence and youthful toughness to survive the flight, let alone the fighting.

There is also a great deal of research that went into writing the German side of the story. I spent hundreds of hours watching video of WWII German life and the Luftwaffe (their air force) in 1941. I read many books for children about Germany in WWII, both fiction and non-fiction. I spent hours and hours learning about Hitler Youth and the horrors of Nazi propaganda for children, plus researched the specific pilot and crew who bombed Parnall's. They were a top crew and the 20th Luftwaffe attempt to bomb the factory; all previous 19 crews had failed. 

 It was incredibly eye-opening to be in their world too, the German families, pilots, and children. I found much that was comparable between Gisele and Marcus, yet so much that was horribly different. 

One example: Marcus plays in the Pucklechurch swing orchestra in the book (and in real life). At the BDM/Hitler Youth meeting for girls, Gisele hears about the "Swing Kids" and is warned not to become one of them. As my research went deeper into the youthful resistance of the swing kids (their crime was listening to American and British swing music), I discovered that many hundreds of them were rounded up and murdered by the Nazis later in the war. 

Here's a trailer for a 1993 movie about the German SWING KIDS, with Christian Bale.  

Final thoughts on research ...

I read constantly and widely. I read stacks and stacks (and stacks) of historical fiction and non-fiction books (and watched their movie adaptations) about WWII for middle grade readers and adults, from writers all over the world. I can't possibly name them all here but a few include: The Book Thief (Markus Zusak), All the Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr), Making Bombs for Hitler (Marsha Skrypuch, Canadian writer), War Stories (Gordon Korman, Canadian), Under the Iron Bridge (Kathy Kacer, Canadian), many Alan Gratz books including Prisoner B-3087, Eyes on the Ice (Anna Rosner), Hitler Youth: Growing up in Hitler's Shadow (Susan Bartoletti), and many, many more. I read constantly, which provided a valuable writer's reference library of styles, ideas, and interesting secondary-text facts. 

A note on using the internet: I did use the internet for research too, but usually only after I'd found the first mention or facts about something in a book. OR, I stayed within well known and trusted sites like the Imperial War Museum (IWM) or the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).

Finally: My final advice to anyone writing historical fiction for children is to find a group of fellow writers who do the work too and ask questions! MANY THANKS to Canadian author Marsha Skrypuch for discussing war words in titles for young readers, her thoughtful advice was absolutely what I needed to hear to choose the right words for THE WAR LANTERN. And many thanks also to Frieda Wishinsky, Rebecca Upjohn, Monica Kulling, there from the start and writers and historians all. 

3. What was it like to write about a family member and his survival of a real WWII event?

Author's grandparents, uncle, and father (right) 
Chipping Sodbury @ 1930

I was close to my father. We look alike and my love of music and books came from him. At the beginning of this book project, I had no idea that writing about him would be so hard, though. I soon realized that because I was writing about family and a real event that killed 53 people and injured many more, I had to be as exacting in the facts as possible, and respectful of the horrors of the bombing without being merely sensational. I had a duty to be responsible with people's lives in that place at that time, so I had to get the facts right.

Although I knew the outlines of the story of my father's bombing survival, which he shared with me in it's entirety when he was well into old age, I knew none of the real facts, or much about the life that my father and his family lived in February, 1941 in Chipping Sodbury. So I went to the UK to visit his family home on Broad Street, and walk the hills, see the churches, the factory site, the school. I met people who knew my grandparents (no one remembered my father, who left England to come to Canada right after the war), and those who knew my grandfather Murray's photography.

Murray Dowding photo of Stone Henge @ 1905

I am usually careful in my writing, but for this project I felt an extra burden of being as exact as I could, to honour the people who fought and died, or lived. I hope I achieved that; there will be inaccuracies and I apologize for those, but I hope the feeling is right. There's no one left in my family to ask about life in 1941 anymore, so that solitary act of being the one to tell the story was a great honour, a responsibility, and I took it as a solemn and sacred duty. 

That's the biggest difference between all my other books and this one: I had to get it right.

4. What's the greatest problem I had to overcome in writing THE WAR LANTERN? 

The greatest problem I had was working day after day for three years, deeply mired in the relentless sorrow, fear, and destruction of war. 

The actual Parnall's bombing scene is something that I wrote and rewrote dozens of times, and writers will understand this, but if you're not a writer, here's the truth: we write best when we go right into the scene, feel, see, hear, smell, touch everything that our characters do. It's an act of willful and controlled dissociation from the here and now, and in this case, an act of time-travel too. 

A Luftwaffe Heinkel 111 bomber

It was difficult to willingly venture every day into the desperate fear of England and the absolute horrors of Nazi Germany in February, 1941. I had to take many breaks, and some days I knew I had to take time away from writing. 

At times, the sorrow and senseless reality of death and war weighed heavily on me, and I could have stopped writing the book altogether, but as I say in my acknowledgments, my young characters got me through. 

Marcus, Gisele, and Charlie had no choice but to live through WWII, so I could write about it safely from my office decades later. I couldn't stop, for them.

Parnall's turret assembly shop, 4 days after the 1941 bombing

I persevered and I'm so grateful that I did. Thank you again to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and my amazing publishing, editing and marketing team at DCB Young Readers. Near the end of the final, final edits in June 2026, my wonderful editor said to me patiently and kindly, "Philippa, you may be overthinking this." Yes, I agreed. I definitely am, and I definitely must.

5. Any advice for writers of historical fiction for children? 

Go for it. Expect it to be hard. Keep good notes and write everything down (don't rely on memory even if yours is much better than mine). Follow the crumbs. Revisit your research often. Be brave. Take breaks from the material when you need to. Let your characters lead the way. Write about difficult things, because the next generation of readers need to know. Be the bridge between then and now. Hold the torch high. Let your heart break when it needs to, just a little. Do it for you, do it for them, do it for everyone, but do it. 

From journey to book! PD, September 2026

Historical fiction for children is the most challenging genre I've ever tackled, but in the end it has been the the most rewarding work of all.

GOOD LUCK!

All Posts about THE WAR LANTERN on this blog

 You're Invited to the Book Launch: 

November 3rd, 2026, 6:30 - 8: 30 p.m.,

Mabel's Fables Bookstore, Toronto