Author Laurie Calkhoven successfully captures the serious drama, the tension, and the stench of the Civil War in her novel about the Battle of Gettyburg. The book with the longest title of this year's Mark Twain Award nominees is fully titled Boys of Wartime: Will at the Battle of Gettysburg 1863. It began as many such stories, with a 12-year-old boy who thinks he is ready to face the war. Too many times, we have heard of the boys, too young to enlist, who yearned to fight, or as in this case, dreams of being a drummer in the war. In spite of its predictable and trite beginning, the book picks up pace in the middle.
I have always been intrigued with the Civil War. It is about the most complicated war in the history books, from the reasons to the logistics, but the uniforms and the culture have such an allure to modern armchair history buffs. In her book, Calkhoven successfully places her character into the battle and whittles it into something that can be easily followed. She correctly gets the boy from one end of the battle to the other in a realistic manner and allows him to meet and interact with historic figures in a way that seems like it could have actually happened.
I have always been intrigued with the Civil War. It is about the most complicated war in the history books, from the reasons to the logistics, but the uniforms and the culture have such an allure to modern armchair history buffs. In her book, Calkhoven successfully places her character into the battle and whittles it into something that can be easily followed. She correctly gets the boy from one end of the battle to the other in a realistic manner and allows him to meet and interact with historic figures in a way that seems like it could have actually happened.
| Laurie Calkhoven's website provides a synopsis of the book: Twelve-year-old Will wants to be a drummer in the Union army, but he's stuck far from the fighting in his sleepy hometown of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Then the Union and Confederate armies converge on Gettysburg, and suddenly Will and his family are caught up in the battle. Even though Will at the Battle of Gettysburg is a story about the deadliest battle in the deadliest war in U.S. history, Calkhoven very successfully depicts it for young readers. At the same time, she does not water down the human element. Bullets still fly and hit their targets. Surgeons still resort to bone saws. Severed arms and legs still get tossed into piles. The stench of death is unbearably real. |
I was rooting for Will throughout, and I never had the feeling that everyone was going to live happily ever after. This, after all, is not a fairy tale.
If a student reads (or is read) as few as four of the twelve Mark Twain Award nominees from the Missouri Association of School Librarians list, s/he may officially vote to help determine the 2014 recipient of the award.
