Veteran's latest historical fiction book explores 'what's next' after surviving a war
By Meleah Lyden, Matthew Peddie
June 13, 2026 at 5:00 AM EDT
On "Florida Matters Live & Local," writer, poet and Iraq War veteran Kevin Powers talks about his new fiction novel "Children of the Wild," which highlights World War I.
A new historical fiction novel asks the question: Once you survive a war, "what do you do next?"
Writer, poet and Iraq War veteran Kevin Powers brings both research and personal experience to his latest novel "Children of the Wild," which highlights World War I.
According to the book's synopsis, it tells a "love story set in the Virginia mountains and on the battlefields of World War I France. It focuses on two men: Roy Young and Ennis Duke — who join the Great War — and Roy's best friend since childhood, Samantha Hatton.
"Children of the Wild captures what it means to be human in times of loss — and how, even in darkness, the light of friendship and love endures," the book synopsis writes.
The Florida resident has spent much of his career writing about conflict. His acclaimed debut, "The Yellow Birds," was set against the backdrop of Iraq.
On "Florida Matters Live & Local," Powers explained how much of the book reflects some of his personal experiences and more.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
This book is about a lot of characters, but the two main characters are Ennis and Roy. They're very different young men. They begin as rivals for the affection of another character named Samantha, and they become fast friends. How do you go about creating and writing a character like Ennis, who's grown up in the woods with pretty much no modern comforts whatsoever?
Well, it certainly requires a lot of imagination, but I sort of thought of Roy and Ennis as kind of mirror images.
So, playing off that, Roy is somebody who's entitled; he has social expectation, he comes from wealth, his family is important.
"If you survive, your life is completely changed. What do you do next? What do you do when you have to reestablish a totally new worldview? And for these characters, it all comes down to the relationships that they have with the people around them."
And so, in contrast, Ennis is somebody who has basically had no contact with society whatsoever. In a lot of ways, he's sort of a blank slate. All the ideas he's had about the world are kind of uninfluenced by social structures.
It was really just a matter of finding two characters I could kind of compare and contrast their reaction to the situations they find themselves in.
Your writing is very sensory. You describe these sorts of first encounters they have with each other. Ennis, as he comes into civilization with the Young family, talks about the smell of the soap kind of bothering his nose. Sort of talk about your process there. How do you kind of get in the head of a character like that and try to describe it through his eyes?
It's interesting. In some ways, I think the job of the writer is to try to put the reader in the shoes of each character, and so you really have to kind of ask yourself every question — what is different from my experience than this character's experience would be?
"Children of the Wild" is a novel by Kevin Powers set in the Virginia mountains and on the battlefields of World War I France. (2144x3237, AR: 0.6623416743898671)
As you said, down to never really having smelled soap, never having combed your hair, and then it's just sort of a follow-on kind of domino effect of every consequence each of those choices and decisions would have for a person's life and for their perspective and their worldview.
For me, it's just trying to be as detailed as possible, so that you give the reader the opportunity to look through that character's eyes.
You now live on Florida's First Coast but grew up in Richmond, Virginia. What was your childhood like? Were you out in the woods a lot yourself?
I was, yeah. And even though the place I'm describing in Virginia, that they're all from, is fictional, it's really a combination of a lot of different landscapes that I kind of fell in love with as a young person in Virginia, going camping out in the mountains, hunting, and that sort of thing.
I spent a lot of time in the woods. The natural world is really important to me, and thinking about these two characters who end up going to war, it's basically as diametrically opposed to the experience of this sort of beautiful, pristine valley as you could possibly imagine, thrown up against the kind of the horror of the Western Front of the First World War.
Roy and Ennis enlist in the U.S. Army's 317th regiment and are sent to fight in France. There's some really vivid description of the fighting. You served in Iraq as a machine gunner. When you're writing some of these passages, how much are you drawing on personal experience? How much of it is research?
Kevin Powers is a novelist, poet and a veteran of the war in Iraq. (3526x4936, AR: 0.7143435980551054)
It did involve a lot of research. Certainly, I could refer to my own experience to a small degree, but thankfully, I didn't experience anything like what these characters go through, or what real soldiers who fought in the First World War went through.
So, I read a lot of books, a lot of journals written by soldiers, a lot of history books covering what the experience was like for those soldiers, but when it comes down to it, I do think my interest in the subject is probably rooted in my own experience.
I think in some ways my experience is war and conflict, but it's more about how it reveals our seemingly endless capacity for resilience, so I like to think I can draw on that well, also when thinking about my own experience,
Before they ship out, Roy gets into a bit of a fight with his parents. They aren't keen on him signing up. Do you get the sense that there were conversations like that happening all across the United States in 1917 as the U.S. was preparing to enter World War I?
Yeah, it was obviously a complicated decision for the government to join the First World War. There was a lot of resistance to it, and unfortunately, like every conflict, there were a lot of young men who were really enthusiastic about going.
What was interesting about that period is, we're at that point still in living memory of the Civil War, and that's something I try to put into the book, is kind of the way that generation after generation people seem to try to learn the lessons of what war is really about, and how generation after generation there seems to be enough young men who want to prove those lessons wrong.
"I think in some ways my experience is war and conflict, but it's more about how it reveals our seemingly endless capacity for resilience..."
So, yeah, it was a complicated time, but I imagine those conversations took place as they do in every generation.
What about the experience of enlisting as an idealistic teenager or 20-something, and then coming face to face with the reality of war. How much of that reflects your own journey?
I mean, 100%, I think a lot of books have been written about naive young men going to war and having their illusions stripped away. I wrote one, and this book does deal with that, but in a lot of ways, I think this book is more about, well, what's next?
If you survive, your life is completely changed. What do you do next? What do you do when you have to reestablish a totally new worldview?
And for these characters, it all comes down to the relationships that they have with the people around them.
You can listen to the full interview in the media player above. This story was compiled from an interview by Matthew Peddie for "Florida Matters Live & Local." You can listen to the full episode here.
Writer, poet and Iraq War veteran Kevin Powers brings both research and personal experience to his latest novel "Children of the Wild," which highlights World War I.
According to the book's synopsis, it tells a "love story set in the Virginia mountains and on the battlefields of World War I France. It focuses on two men: Roy Young and Ennis Duke — who join the Great War — and Roy's best friend since childhood, Samantha Hatton.
"Children of the Wild captures what it means to be human in times of loss — and how, even in darkness, the light of friendship and love endures," the book synopsis writes.
The Florida resident has spent much of his career writing about conflict. His acclaimed debut, "The Yellow Birds," was set against the backdrop of Iraq.
On "Florida Matters Live & Local," Powers explained how much of the book reflects some of his personal experiences and more.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
This book is about a lot of characters, but the two main characters are Ennis and Roy. They're very different young men. They begin as rivals for the affection of another character named Samantha, and they become fast friends. How do you go about creating and writing a character like Ennis, who's grown up in the woods with pretty much no modern comforts whatsoever?
Well, it certainly requires a lot of imagination, but I sort of thought of Roy and Ennis as kind of mirror images.
So, playing off that, Roy is somebody who's entitled; he has social expectation, he comes from wealth, his family is important.
"If you survive, your life is completely changed. What do you do next? What do you do when you have to reestablish a totally new worldview? And for these characters, it all comes down to the relationships that they have with the people around them."
And so, in contrast, Ennis is somebody who has basically had no contact with society whatsoever. In a lot of ways, he's sort of a blank slate. All the ideas he's had about the world are kind of uninfluenced by social structures.
It was really just a matter of finding two characters I could kind of compare and contrast their reaction to the situations they find themselves in.
Your writing is very sensory. You describe these sorts of first encounters they have with each other. Ennis, as he comes into civilization with the Young family, talks about the smell of the soap kind of bothering his nose. Sort of talk about your process there. How do you kind of get in the head of a character like that and try to describe it through his eyes?
It's interesting. In some ways, I think the job of the writer is to try to put the reader in the shoes of each character, and so you really have to kind of ask yourself every question — what is different from my experience than this character's experience would be?
"Children of the Wild" is a novel by Kevin Powers set in the Virginia mountains and on the battlefields of World War I France. (2144x3237, AR: 0.6623416743898671)
As you said, down to never really having smelled soap, never having combed your hair, and then it's just sort of a follow-on kind of domino effect of every consequence each of those choices and decisions would have for a person's life and for their perspective and their worldview.
For me, it's just trying to be as detailed as possible, so that you give the reader the opportunity to look through that character's eyes.
You now live on Florida's First Coast but grew up in Richmond, Virginia. What was your childhood like? Were you out in the woods a lot yourself?
I was, yeah. And even though the place I'm describing in Virginia, that they're all from, is fictional, it's really a combination of a lot of different landscapes that I kind of fell in love with as a young person in Virginia, going camping out in the mountains, hunting, and that sort of thing.
I spent a lot of time in the woods. The natural world is really important to me, and thinking about these two characters who end up going to war, it's basically as diametrically opposed to the experience of this sort of beautiful, pristine valley as you could possibly imagine, thrown up against the kind of the horror of the Western Front of the First World War.
Roy and Ennis enlist in the U.S. Army's 317th regiment and are sent to fight in France. There's some really vivid description of the fighting. You served in Iraq as a machine gunner. When you're writing some of these passages, how much are you drawing on personal experience? How much of it is research?
Kevin Powers is a novelist, poet and a veteran of the war in Iraq. (3526x4936, AR: 0.7143435980551054)
It did involve a lot of research. Certainly, I could refer to my own experience to a small degree, but thankfully, I didn't experience anything like what these characters go through, or what real soldiers who fought in the First World War went through.
So, I read a lot of books, a lot of journals written by soldiers, a lot of history books covering what the experience was like for those soldiers, but when it comes down to it, I do think my interest in the subject is probably rooted in my own experience.
I think in some ways my experience is war and conflict, but it's more about how it reveals our seemingly endless capacity for resilience, so I like to think I can draw on that well, also when thinking about my own experience,
Before they ship out, Roy gets into a bit of a fight with his parents. They aren't keen on him signing up. Do you get the sense that there were conversations like that happening all across the United States in 1917 as the U.S. was preparing to enter World War I?
Yeah, it was obviously a complicated decision for the government to join the First World War. There was a lot of resistance to it, and unfortunately, like every conflict, there were a lot of young men who were really enthusiastic about going.
What was interesting about that period is, we're at that point still in living memory of the Civil War, and that's something I try to put into the book, is kind of the way that generation after generation people seem to try to learn the lessons of what war is really about, and how generation after generation there seems to be enough young men who want to prove those lessons wrong.
"I think in some ways my experience is war and conflict, but it's more about how it reveals our seemingly endless capacity for resilience..."
So, yeah, it was a complicated time, but I imagine those conversations took place as they do in every generation.
What about the experience of enlisting as an idealistic teenager or 20-something, and then coming face to face with the reality of war. How much of that reflects your own journey?
I mean, 100%, I think a lot of books have been written about naive young men going to war and having their illusions stripped away. I wrote one, and this book does deal with that, but in a lot of ways, I think this book is more about, well, what's next?
If you survive, your life is completely changed. What do you do next? What do you do when you have to reestablish a totally new worldview?
And for these characters, it all comes down to the relationships that they have with the people around them.
You can listen to the full interview in the media player above. This story was compiled from an interview by Matthew Peddie for "Florida Matters Live & Local." You can listen to the full episode here.