In the aptly titled Over the Top, author Michael Paris directs his readers through a tour of British juvenile literature produced during the war years, 1914–18. Acknowledging that far more scholarly attention has been given either to post-1918 war writings or to the war literature of canonical authors like Wells, Kipling, and John Buchan, Paris presents his work as an act of recovery. Thus, he aims to resurrect noncanonical adventure romance fiction that was produced until conscription in 1916 as propaganda to encourage recruits for voluntary service. For Paris, these imperial adventure stories form an important subspecies of the British school story that proliferated at a time electrified by intense wartime patriotism. Paris reminds us that, between August and December 1914, almost two and a half million men volunteered for military service—in part because they read stories that stirred them, inspired them with idealized, sanitized visions of war. Nostalgia is surely one of Paris's preoccupations in this study: he notes an interesting counterpoint between the modern technologies of trench warfare and the chivalric combat myth. These war stories, argues Paris, tap into a British collective consciousness, reverberating with the classicism of the public school curriculum and proving the tenacity of the warrior elite, those knights of old most recently remembered doing heroic battle in the arena of nineteenth-century colonial warfare. Thus, Paris begins where he must, introducing his readers to the iconic figure of personal heroism, the single and singular soldier from the Wonder Book of Soldiers. As Paris persuasively claims, trench warfare could be, by contrast to the chivalric past and colonial battle, tedious, impersonal, and unheroic—a type of warfare that desperately needed heroic and idealizing narratives.

The greatest challenge Paris faces in writing this book is what will strike some readers as predictability. At the end of his introduction, Paris admits that his interest concerns a generation of writers, imitators of the nineteenth-century adventure writer George Alfred Henty, “who told essentially the same story” (xxii). The formulaic quality of the literature Paris examines generates conclusions that grow quickly redundant. As readers come to the end of Over the Top, they may feel disappointed when Paris admits that “authors had really moved on very little in their representation of the war since 1914” (150). To rescue his book from this kind of “same-ness,” Paris might have offered a better articulation of the juxtaposition between what he calls “the pleasure culture of war” (xvii) and deeply imbedded British anxieties about empire, fitness, and invasion. This seeming contradiction takes later, more localized shape when Paris looks at the flying machine as an object of both romance and apprehension. Such paradoxes demand a more supple theorizing response. So too Paris might have considered more fully the intricate exchanges between modernization and nostalgia, between society and pulp fiction, or he might have more deftly theorized the utility of children's literature. Here he offers a fairly rudimentary explanation of children's books as tools for socialization. Other matters receive short shrift as well. Class and race, and how they inform conceptions of masculinity embodied particularly in the “ex-public schoolboy” ideal, seem peripheral; only the second chapter gives any sort of extended discussion of class. Questions of narrative and voice receive slack treatment, and the inclusion of different genres like the historical romance, the newsreel novel, and the history dilutes the focus on adventure romance. Furthermore, Paris's schematic sense that the period witnessed a move from romance to realism needs additional testing. Finally, a reader might be eager for more information concerning the readership of these tales. Paris's decision to open with an extract from the South African fiction writer Stuart Cloete's autobiography makes for an effective beginning; however, this Victorian son's romance with “only glory” reminds a reader how strangely depopulated Paris's book is. Where are its other boy readers?

One might claim that Paris's book could do no more. An overview of the chapters’ foci captures the book's range: the trench; the air war that, with its aerial dogfights, became the arena for heroic individualism; the extra-European campaigns; and the arrival of tank technology. Like a useful catalog, Paris's book possesses a richness that often shows up in the details. Readers will enjoy learning about Paris's key authors, the prolific F. S. Brereton and Herbert Strang, and discovering what facts remain regarding the formation of a wartime governmental propaganda machine, well-oiled by the collusion of several eminent fiction writers. The play of different nationalities within the war tales themselves enlivens the book's analysis: that the colonized were often represented as unified under British rule, an able “imperial brotherhood in arms” (110); that Canada typically figured in these war stories as an idealized preindustrial England; that the French and the Americans played prescribed roles; and that the Germans—whether in touring oompah bands or through the Zeppelin Menace—seemed ever poised to spy upon or invade England. But Paris is best at capturing the reality and ideality of trench warfare. The book's richest moment features a Henry Newbolt story in which the “cozy” trenches are likened to something out of Peter Pan; here, Paris argues provocatively, the front line becomes a “nursery fantasy” (33). Other rich material, however, ends up only as glimpsed narratives or arguments that create organizational problems. Film makes the occasional appearance, as do a few realistic narratives; the material on Gallipoli and its literary representations seems anomalous given the book's parameters. One wonders about Paris's decision not to take up naval literature when it necessarily ends up making several cameo appearances given the supremacy of the Royal Navy at the time. But the true odd man out in this book is women—girl readers, female characters, and, most significantly, women authors. Bessie Marchant is a kind of shadow figure in this book. Once dubbed “the female Henty,” Paris tells us, she churned out wartime literature about female munitions workers and transport girls. These glimpsed narratives tantalize but ultimately frustrate the reader; they speak of a possible richness just out of reach.