A NOTE FROM AVI Many years ago, when my late father-in-law observed my young kids collecting baseball cards, he recalled growing up in Eastern Europe, when he and his friends collected (stole) uniform buttons from the ever-changing armies that passed through his village during World War I. That long-ago vignette was the basis for this book. I think of this book as very different from my other books. Perhaps this will help to explain: When Graham Greene wrote the film script for The Third Man (one of my favorite movies), he wrote it as a narrative. It was published that way and may be read as a novella. To some degree, I think of The Button War as a movie script, insofar that as I wrote I tried to visualize the book every bit of the way. (Usually I hear my books as I write.) A movie was not my intent, but in the sense that The Third Man was a movie script/novella, so too is The Button War. Part of my research for this book was to look at many photographs of World War I. Newsreels too. I saw the boys as a real group. Watched them interact. Saw the world in which they lived —and its gradual destruction. Moreover, I began to purchase the buttons (eBay!) and found them fascinating, In short, this is a very real book to me. In another Greene book, Our Man in Havana, he, for me, sums up what The Button War is: “Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it”#buttonwar Buttons purchased by Avi for research“Avi is a master of just about anything he writes.” —BookPage “Avi is one of our most versatile and prolific children’s writers.” —Booklist “A superb craftsmat —2003 Newbery Award Selection Committee ALSO BY AVI ‘The Most Important Thing What Do Fish Have to Do With HC: 978-0-7636-8111-1 Anything? Also available as an e-book and in audio PB: 978-0-7636-2319-7 $16.99 ($23.00 CAN) Also available as an e-book ‘Age 10 and up + 224 pages $6.99 ($8.00 CAN) A Junior Library Guild Selection ‘Age 10 and up + 208 pages * “Avi’s deft incorporation of humor, heartache, and the occasional touch of the supernatural will draw readers in.” — Publishers Weekly starred review) CANDLEWICK PRESS ‘www.candlewick.com