In this masterpiece, Avi perfectly portrays the jostling unease of a pack of teenage boys trying to work out who is their alpha male. It's a story many, if not most, boys of 13 or 14 will be familiar with. In Jurek, a little loved orphan desperate to prove his supremacy and be 'King' of the woods and the village, Avi gives our hero, Patryck, his nemesis. Patryck cannot bear to see Jurek lord it over their gang of weaker spirits, but to defeat his rival he must constantly ignore his conscience. At every stage of the button war - a challenge set by Jurek in which each boy vies to steal the best button from the soldiers battling for ownership of their village - the reader is willing Patryck to turn back, to stand up to Jurek and refuse to be manipulated but, confused and surrounded by the traumas of war, Patryck can see no other way than to beat Jurek at his own game.

Avi's storytelling is never trite, always probing. The boys' battle is an echo of the fight raging around them, through which Avi starkly highlights the futility of war - not just World War One, but any war - and the plight of the people caught as collateral between opposing armies. As the novel concludes, Jurek stands high on a pile of rubble brandishing his winning button and the schoolmaster's cane with which he plans to rule, and declares his victory to the thin air: there is no-one to hear his crowing, and nobody left to lord it over. In a mirror of the actual war, all of his 'friend's have fallen or fled because of his crazed pursuit of the soldier's buttons. Patryck's words 'Keep your eyes on Jurek. He's the dangerous one' as German planes loom on the horizon, are an astute reminder of the power of individuals to create moral havoc - even war - when we give them power of us.

It's a novel which begs the question of the reader; if you were in Patryck's place, when would you turn back? A powerful story about not only war, but peer pressure and integrity, although bleak, it deserves a place on every school library shelf and, especially for boys, it's message is dynamite.