The War That Saved My Life
The War That Saved My Life
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Kimberly Brubaker Bradley on The War That Saved My Life
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A question that demanded a characterThe book began not with Ada but with a historical puzzle. Bradley was deep in research on Britain’s wartime evacuation program, which sent roughly three million children out of cities to live with rural strangers, and she kept running into accounts of how damaging the separation was for most of them. That damage forced a counter-question: who would be the exception?
I started with researching the evacuation of British children during WWII, and then started to think of a character for whom it might have been unmitigated good — for most children it was pretty traumatic, being taken away to live with strangers while their parents stayed put to get bombed — what would make it the opposite?
Once Ada arrived as the answer to that question, she came with a completeness Bradley had not experienced before. Her previous books had required her to work out character through plot; this one reversed the process, the character arriving whole before the story was solved.
Ada’s creation was more organic than any of my previous protagonists. I dreamed about these characters and could see the ending of the book way in advance. I’m a character-driven writer; I usually put characters in situations, then figure out how to get them out.
That early clarity about where the book was going did not spare her the struggle of getting there. Her editor read the first eighty pages and responded: ‘This isn’t really your next book, is it?’
How she wrote it
Six revisions to find a voice, then six moreThe single hardest technical problem was finding the right position for Ada’s narrating self relative to the events she was living through. Bradley tried first person, then third, and kept losing what the character could credibly know and say. The solution she eventually landed on is announced on the book’s third page: ‘The story I’m telling starts out four years ago, at the beginning of the summer of 1939.’
I used a literary device to control the narrative voice, beginning The War That Saved My Life with Ada telling her story from four years in the future. If I’d used direct point-of-view, she wouldn’t have known words for many of the things she’s trying to describe. I had to be able to explain the events of the story while still maintaining a childlike point-of-view.
Arriving at that device cost her the opening chapters many times over. She wrote them repeatedly before the retrospective frame clicked into place, and once it did the full manuscript still needed six more passes before copyediting.
I’ll be honest, Ada’s voice was far and away the hardest thing for me to get right. I wrote the first few chapters over and over again, sometimes in first person, sometimes in third.
Research for the setting ran through two stages. British evacuee memoirs and school-curriculum facsimiles of wartime documents gave her the historical texture, but text alone eventually proved insufficient. In 2012 she used her children’s school spring break to make the trip herself, spending time at the Imperial War Museum in London before heading into the Kent countryside that Ada rides across.
Eventually, however, I realized I was going to have to see Kent with my own eyes in order to be able to describe it through Ada’s. In 2012 my family spent our children’s spring break in England. Highlights included the Imperial War Museum, where I could see actual Spitfires, boats that helped with the Dunkirk evacuations, bombs, identity cards, rations books, an Anderson shelter — all the stuff — and then driving around Kent, getting completely lost in back roads, and stumbling across the remains of one of the hundreds of airfields thrown up in England during the war. I also climbed to the top of Ada’s hill and looked out at the sea.
Mapping Ada’s emotional damage required a different order of research entirely, one rooted not in archives but in the science of childhood trauma. A friend’s experience adopting a child from an overseas orphanage gave Bradley a close-up model for what recovery from hard places actually looks like in a child’s behavior and timeline.
The majority of my research involved understanding what happens to kids from hard places. Kids from trauma don’t immediately blossom, it takes time.
Not every source was a document or a journey. In a March 2025 Mackin Storyteller Spotlight interview, Bradley revealed that Susan, the book’s reluctant guardian who takes in Ada and her brother Jamie, was modeled on a character from Jane Austen’s ‘Mansfield Park,’ a debt she expected no reader to catch.
Susan from ‘The War That Saved My Life’ is an example. She is based on one of my favorite characters in one of my favorite novels, which is a book called ‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen... I mean I know that nobody else would ever get it. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
Writing from a place of healingBradley drew on her own experience of PTSD when building Ada’s inner life, but she worked hard to keep the surface details of their situations distinct. She expected the distance she had engineered to protect her from the emotional weight of the material. It did not.
I didn’t think it was going to be cathartic — I went to pretty great lengths to have the specifics of Ada’s situation be very different from mine, and to have her reactions and life dissimilar to mine. But in the end it was more healing that I expected. I don’t think I could have written this book until I’d come pretty well to terms with my past. I had to write it from a place of healing.
That condition, writing from a place of healing rather than from inside the wound, shaped the book’s emotional register. Ada’s recovery is slow and interrupted, but the narrating voice always carries the knowledge that recovery was possible.
What she wants us to sit with
Honesty as the only real giftWhen asked directly what she hoped readers would take from Ada’s determination, Bradley answered in one sentence. The brevity was the point: the book’s entire arc is the argument behind it.
That no one is entirely powerless.
That conviction about power connects to a broader principle she holds about what children’s fiction is actually obligated to do. She does not soften Ada’s mother or pause the war, because softening them would betray the readers who live in equally unforgiving circumstances.
I think children face hard things all the time. The best gift I can give them is honesty about the struggles in their lives and in my character’s lives.
She has also drawn a precise line between what the first book accomplishes and what its sequel, ‘The War I Finally Won,’ takes on. The distinction is not just thematic: it describes two different developmental tasks, one inside Ada and one Ada performs for someone else.
The War That Saved My Life is about finding a place of safety; book two is about providing a place of safety.
For readers coming to the first book on its own, that framing clarifies what to watch for: not Ada learning gratitude for safety, but Ada forming any conception of what safety even is. Those are not the same thing, and the book does not let them be.