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Reviewed by Mattie Lang
Opening sentence
They were still 400 yards from the strip of white beach and the crammed jungle behind it when the fighter planes came.
Frank, a 19-year-old radio operator joins the war in the Pacific despite his history of tuberculosis. To him, it is an opportunity to prove that he has recovered after a long struggle with the disease and that he is better than his ‘useless’ father, who escaped the draft in World War One.

He is soon sent to a small island behind enemy lines with a fellow kiwi and Les, a grumpy Australian soldier tasked with protecting them. While at first, Frank thinks the job of Coast-watcher an easy, cushy posting, he soon realises how hard it will be after a Solomon Islander comes to him, claiming to have information that could change the course of the war.

The book ‘Coastwatcher’ by David Hill is a fast-paced war story set in the Pacific Theatre during the Second World War. Hill creates a set of interesting characters who feel satisfyingly real, making it obvious plenty of time was spent devising them. It is a shame, however, that enough time was obviously not spent editing the book. Typos dotted the pages like landmines, pulling me out of the action every few chapters. Most of these errors would have easily been picked up on by a simple grammar checker, being basic misspellings of words. Here is an example of a mistake to give an idea of how simple but frustrating they were: ‘They struggled forward ten or 12 yards, enough to hide them from enemy aircraft.’ This occurred on only the seventh page, and there are many, many more errors to come.

While Hill managed to keep up the energy of the start, crafting a book that kept me hooked the entire time, the storyline was predictable. There were no major plot twists and from halfway through the book, I could see where it was going to end. Because of this, it made the novel an entertaining read, but one that I forgot nearly as soon as I had read the last page. That said, sometimes that is just the thing you need in a book.

Another thing I struggled with was the many military abbreviations and acronyms. While these did give the book a more authentic military feel, I was constantly flicking to the glossary to find definitions in the lengthy list, frequently enough that I think any gains from using real terminology were mitigated by the downsides. This once again broke the flow of the story.

It was interesting gaining an insight both into the Pacific Theatre and the lives of soldiers working in military espionage, as I had not come across any books addressing those topics before. Watching Frank struggle under the weight of ‘Old Chatty’, his radio, gave me a new understanding of the difficulties radio operators went through. Hill also did an excellent job of painting the islands as a hellish place, full of a thousand different insects capable of killing you, but I felt that maybe it was overdone at times. Frank must have mistaken a monkey’s cry for a human’s at least ten times throughout the course of the book.

In many war novels, fighting and violence are glorified, but David Hill does a good job of showing the events in this book for what they were; atrocities. In addition, he did not vilify the Japanese who Frank was at war with, instead showing that they too were people just trying to stay alive.

All in all, I would recommend ‘Coastwatcher’ by David Hill for anyone looking for an entertaining but forgettable read. If you look past the simple storyline and the many grammatical and basic spelling errors, Hill’s novel is a good read.

- Mattie is 15 and lives in Nelson.
Publisher: Penguin Random House
ISBN: 9780143775966
Format: Paperback
Publication: 2021
Ages: Intermediate+
Themes: War, historical fiction, adventure.