It has been twenty years since Knowles' classic A Separate Peace first appeared. Now the author returns to Devon, that same New Hampshire boys' school, for his latest novel, Peace Breaks Out. While World War II provided the background for the Gene and Phineas story, in the new novel the war is over and a Devon graduate, Pete Hallam, returns from the war to teach history at the school. Devon serves as a place for Pete to rest and halt time a bit as he tries to sort out a broken marriage and the...

Despite several virtues—some good writing and good observations about how boys live at school—"Peace Breaks Out" suffers from its author having told such a similar story so much better before [in "A Separate Peace"]. A moral mystery of this kind requires, if not the first-person narration of the earlier version, then at least a unified point of view. I suspect Knowles once meant to provide one in the person of his teacher and at some point sensed that his teacher is...

Twenty-one years of real time have passed since John Knowles wrote his classic, A Separate Peace. Three years of novel time have passed with the emergence of the companion book Peace Breaks Out. It is 1945, the war is over, and Pete Hallam returns to Devon as an instructor. He needs to regain his perspective on life and recover from the war, his wounds, and a broken marriage. Hallam's attempt at a retreat is thwarted when two students clash in his first class in American history, and a power struggle...

[In "Peace Breaks Out"] Pete Hallam—class of '37—returning to the Devon School in New Hampshire in the fall of 1945 as a teacher, hopes to recover there from wartime traumas. But the boys in the class of '46 are an edgy bunch, frustrated and guilty because they won't be graduating from the prep school to the armed forces like the classes before them. There's a simmering air of violence among them during the long winter as Pete in his low-keyed way trie...

Knowles surely has been urged many times over the years to write a sequel to his most successful novel, the much admired A Separate Peace, set at the Exeter-like academy called Devon School. [Peace Breaks Out] is that sequel. Devon alumnus Pete Hallam has returned to his alma mater to teach, having survived the Second World War—just starting in the first book—in a prisoner-of-war camp. Knowles knows Devon's turf thoroughly, and, as in the earlier book, his keen eye for examining the amb...