I don’t know if this book is quite for people who don’t know their history. It follows Nino, an immortal Italian boy through several incidents in his thousands of years of existence. In one, I know why Nino’s saying no one will care tomorrow that a slave girl in Pompeii has run away. Gotcha. Then there was one about Nino going to investigate why Poseidon is cranky in Poseidonia (because there's nothing honoring him). Those two, I got. Those two, I enjoyed. I thought there was a clever mingling of fact and fancy. You just have to know the punchlines. You have to know what happens to Pompeii. You have to know about the Poseidon statue.

The rest of the stories… yeah, no idea. It gives specific dates and such, and references empires and uprisings, but there’s scarce more details than that, and the rest of the story is invented. Without being able to place the situation Nino is showing up in, the stories had no effect on me. The history is just the staging for some quirky tales, but I think it’s very important to have the background knowledge to pique interest in the story. I got a little bored/confused with the rest of the book… and felt ridiculously undereducated. I think if I’d known the history of Italy, I would have loved the idea.

Oh, and lovely drawings. ( )

A collection of stories dealing with myths and history, all based around the town of Amalfi in Italy. The eponymous boy is one who mysteriously lives the life of a goatherd from the time of Odysseus's wanderings through the 1800s and who has a subtle hand in some key events in history despite his humble trade.

This is an early Newbery Honor Book - the last of the back catalog for me and one that took some doing to track down - but it stands up pretty well, honestly. It's a clever way of introducing kiddos to some key points in history, and the stories are interesting and nicely told. ( )

Opening in 1927, in the small Italian town of Ravello, this Newbery Honor title - one of six chosen in 1929, along with (among others) The Pigtail of Ah Lee Ben Loo, Clearing Weather and Tod of the Fens - follows the story of Nino, the ageless goat-boy guardian of the peninsula of Sorrentum (modern-day Sorrento), overlooking the beautiful island of Capri, in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Presented as a series of stories - each one featuring the gentle, good-hearted Nino - The Boy Who Was documents the mythology and history of the region, from ancient times, when the island of Capri was said to be inhabited by sirens, and witnessed the passing of Odysseus' ship, to the nineteenth-century Carbonari, rebels who hoped to unite all of Italy into one country.

In between are tales of Poseidonian sailors building a temple to the god of the sea - "Poseidon, shaker of the earth, god of the dark hair;" of a young Jewish slave-girl escaping her Roman master in Pompeii, just before the infamous eruption of Vesuvius; and of a fierce (Ostro)Goth warrior, a survivor of the Battle of Tagina and the Siege of Cumae, making his way north. Here too are the stories of the Normans who saved the city of Salerno from Saracen pirates, "for the love of God" alone; the subsequent Normans, some sixty years later, who - under the command of Robert Guiscard - conquered the same city; and the coming of a heartbroken young man, whose visions led to the famous Children's Crusade, to the town of Ravello. Finally, the tales of the three medical students who saved the life of the fleeing Lord John of Procida, and of the miracle wrought by Saint Andrew, when the Turkish pirate Redbeard (Khair ed-Din), attacked the town of Amalfi, are also told.

An appealing collection of stories, unified by the running theme of Nino's contribution to the history of Sorrentum, The Boy Who Was is a book that will appeal to young mythology lovers, as well as readers with a taste for historical fiction. I imagine that many of the historical figures will be unfamiliar to contemporary American children, but the context is always explained, and the stories themselves are not difficult to follow at all. The artwork by Harrie Wood - both color plates and black and white chapter-headers - is just beautiful, and Grace Taber Hallock's writing is engaging. I particularly liked some of the poems, like The Siren's Last Song, sung for Nino, the Boy Who Was:

Let this boy forever be
Ward of hills and singing sea.
Let this boy, forever young,
ancient warder be among.
Never let this boy grow old,
Feed his hunger, warm his cold,
Never grudge him salt and bread,
Never grudge him fire and bed.

Let him watch the ships go by,
And cities rise and cities die,
And let his salt and let his bread
Wake visions of the storied dead.
All this I will to him who hears
A siren singing through her tears.
So take your song my little brother,
Never shall you have another. ( )