He's Done It Again!

In an earlier post I reviewed Robert Harris II's abridged adaptation of Wells's The War of the Worlds, written for Ukrainian ESL students. Apparently it was part of a series called "Classics for Today," aimed at helping Ukrainian students learn 1) the English language, 2) major Western literary works, and 3) Patriotic values all in one place. I notice that both the covers seem to have a "blue over gold" visual theme in the artwork as well (in The War of the Worlds it was with the blue and gold sunset, and in this one it's a blue sky over a horizon of gold wheat), which I suspect is an intentional nod to the Ukrainian flag. I'll be honest, I don't normally like the idea of abridged novels anyway, but considering the series's goals and its target audience, I think it gets the job done. I like the way it's laid out, with English on the left page and Ukrainian translation on the right, and vocabulary words highlighted in bold print (there's a mini glossary at the beginning of every chapter) Well, if the goals included "Ukrainian Patriotic Values," the latest installment in that series is a little less subtle about it than the last one was.

No Secrets in the Symbolism

It's a book about a fight for independence, and the allegories to present day events are, I'll admit, a little ham-fisted (American Colonies = modern Ukraine, Great Britain = modern Russia, and France = the modern West, especially the US). The abridged version even adds an entire chapter which was not present in the original, wherein the main character overhears a debate between Marquis de Lafayette and a French Emissary, debating whether it is worth France's time to continue aiding the colonists or not, and the emissary's talking points are almost word-for-word lifted from the MAGA sub-party's statements about Ukraine ("not our war," "Washington started it," "aren't England and America one nation?" and of course "His Majesty has a plan to make France great again and we can't spend all this money on a war that isn't our problem"). It also adds another character who only appears in the last chapter, a French soldier named Pierre, who drops another 'just-in-case-Hiroshima-was-too-subtle' hint about the abridgement's allegorical nature (I won't spoil it).

Entertaining... For a Schoolbook

What the abridged edition lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in the fact that I actually felt like I was reading a novel, rather than a memoir or a textbook. The narrator goes through a full character arc (something that was rather lacking in the original version, as it was the scattered memoirs of a soldier, written several decades after the war as a testimonial rather than a story), and there are all the elements you'd expect from a good adventure novel. Tension builds in every chapter, reaching a boiling point at the Battle of Cowpens (for some reason he insists on spelling it with a hyphen, 'Cow-Pens;' I'm not sure why), and finally a climactic clash at the battle of Yorktown. If you don't mind that it has the low complexity level of a Y.A. novella (it's written for students, after all), it's a decent read for an afternoon or two.

Great for Its Purpose

For my own personal reading it was... okay. Not something that would end up in the DNF file, but probably not something I'll re-read again and again either. For my classroom though, it's amazing! Since the editor is an ESL teacher the supplementary material is all built-in to the book itself. For casual readers this gets in the way a little because there are several pages of "Before You Read" at the beginning of every chapter and two pages of quiz questions after each one, which might get annoying, but as a classroom reader it's ideal because it's less material that the teacher has to create on their own.

Conclusion

What can I say? I liked it, and my students did too. As war novels go it's not Tom Clancy, but it's not supposed to be. It keeps a reader entertained and if they're a Ukrainian speaker, it manages to teach them a little bit of English along the way too. That's... pretty much what it's there for.