The Red Tunic by Kate Wiseman - Review and Blog Tour

Hello and welcome to my post on the tour for The Red Tunic by Kate Wiseman! It is a pleasure to welcome you here. I'm sorry that this post is a day late, but yesterday got away from me. I've been a bit overwhelmed and unwell for the last few weeks, so I needed to just not worry about this yesterday. 

But here I am now! And hopefully, here you are too! Please do have a click around and read some of my other reviews. 

The Red Tunic is mostly set in the trenches in France/Belgium in World War One. The main part of the narrative takes place in 1917. Nina is in uniform, posing as her twin brother, Alfie, in order that she may fight in his place. She is writing to him. The narrative then flashes backwards to various points in the twins' lives, to show us how they got to this point. 

Basically, they are both gender non-conforming. Nina feels totally constricted by the expectations that are held for her as a young woman in the 1910s - she doesn't want to marry well and do embroidery. She wants to fight, be free, get into scrapes, in the same way that Alfie is allowed to. Alfie, meanwhile, definitely reads as a trans woman. However, I will keep using 'she' for Nina and 'he' for Alfie because that is how they are described in the book. This book is set more than a hundred years ago and obviously gender wasn't necessarily understood in the same ways that it is now - I think both twins would be living far freer lives - thankfully - if they were alive now. 

Nina manages to pose as her twin when they are younger, so when the two turn eighteen and Alfie's call up papers arrive, she knows she can pose as him and go to France. She is determined to protect her twin. I actually really liked this about Nina - she's headstrong and knows what she wants in life. I liked the depiction of the trenches and the things that happened there. I liked Alfie's life back home in England, where he is posing as his sister... but I won't spoil that any further because I loved how it unfurled. 

The twins also lost their mother when they were young, and their father is very standoffish and cold towards them. However, they have an aunt, Julia, who is a suffragette and who takes both twins under her wing. I loved her appearances throughout the book. 

I would love for this to be the start of a series! It sort of feels like Young Adult literature in parts, which I also really liked. I'm giving it four out of five.