I Had Seen Castles

I Had Seen Castles, written by Cynthia Rylant, is a historical fiction novel telling one boy’s experiences during World War II. It is told from the point of view of the boy, John, now a man in his sixties. The book is written in the first person point of view, and it is told as a series of flashbacks of different related events leading up to, during, and after the war.

John is seventeen when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and spends the next year waiting until he is old enough to enlist in the military. He meets Ginny, and she tries to persuade him not to go to war. He doesn’t listen to her and is sent to Europe. He stops responding to her letters, and she stops writing to him. However, his memory of her helps him survive the fighting. He returns home, but nothing is the same. He never sees Ginny again but is thankful for her influence on him.

We have talked in class about how Rylant likes to play with words and use them in a different order, different from how people actually talk. For example, John narrates “His was a look I had no experience of” (6), when describing what his father looked like after learning that the Germans figured out how to split the uranium atom.

This was such a sad book. Rylant was really able to personalize the war, and it allowed me to imagine myself as each of the characters. What would it be like to be sent to fight in a foreign country at age 18? What would it be like it the person I loved was sent to fight? Or my son? I can’t even begin to imagine what this might be like, but Rylant really started me thinking about this. Her personalization of what is often dehumanized and not personal is what makes this story so powerful.