#tbt: Kipling's Choice by Geert Spillebeen

Kipling's Choice by Geert Spillebeen. Translated by Terese Edelstein. 154 p. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005. 0618431241. (Own) 

#tbt features Kipling's Choice by Geert Spillebeen. This novel was originally published in Belgium and was translated by Therese Edelstein for an American audience in 2005. The story opens on a battlefield during WWI. John Kipling lies mortally wounded and reflects on his life. John is Rudyard Kipling's only child and both of them suffered from poor eyesight, which prevented his father from serving in an earlier war and initially prevented his son from serving in WWI. But the elder Kipling was now a famous author and pulled some strings to get John accepted. The story switches between John, written in first-person, and his memories, written third-person omniscient. This thought-provoking novel is a fictionalized account of real events.