“Everything happened at once. The plane… bullets darting across the water… screams… the boat shooting up into the sky.” A Boy At War, by Harry Mazer, is a well-known historical fiction novel. In the book, there is a boy named Adam who lives in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father is in the navy. Adam doesn’t have many friends but meets a kid named Martin, a young Japanese boy. The year is 1941, and the Americans were fighting the Japanese, people didn’t normally like them because of the war. But Adam and Martin still become freinds. They got to know each other and decided to go fishing. But when they went fishing early morning December 1, 1941 the navel ships were bombed, by Japanese planes.

I believe Mazer did an exquisite job keeping the reader in suspense. I enjoyed when he expressed the mother’s feeling when she saw Adam after the tragic day happened. Also, I was impressed with how he described the thoughts of Adam after the attack. I loved this book. It has to be my favorite of all time. The book kept me in suspense, and made me feel like I was actually there to see the attack on Pearl Harbor. All of the action and the questions that the characters had, made me want to keep reading. I would recommend this book to people who like suspense, action, and historical fiction books. I would say 4th grade and above is appropriate reading level for this book.