On My Honor: The Last Full Measure by Ann Rinaldi

How could David always be so sure of his own rightness and never question himself? Never waiver for a moment to see the other person's side of it? Not even for a God-given little minute? Myself, somehow, despite my young years, I always knew there was another side to everything, and that was what frightened me in this world. The other side of things, and the fact that I might not see them.

But not my brother David--oh, no. He knew all and he saw all, God help him.

Tacy Stryker is 14, living in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in July of 1863. Her dad and two older brothers are off with the Union Army, and Tacy and her mother are left in the care of her older brother, David. David is both bitter and shamed that his shattered leg makes him unable to fight with his brothers, and Tacy, just beginning to feel herself a young woman, chafes under his harsh rule. She feels she is treated like a child, scolded for slipping out to check on Marvelous, her friend who is hiding in the nearby woods with other free blacks to avoid a return to slavery by the Rebels, or for daring to visit a friend treating the wounded in a makeshift hospital in the local church.

Until the war impinges on her world, she has been very close to David, the youngest brother, her playmate and ally, but as the war comes into her own home, David's assurance that he is always right crosses with Tacy's way of thinking often, and she struggles to meet her brother's expectations and be true to herself as well. But as the town fills with Confederates and she meets them face to face, she suddenly sees that she can never see the world in the same way David does.

Veteran historical fiction writer Ann Rinaldi sets up a family drama which is in a way a metaphor for the conflicting versions of honor which helped provoke the war itself. In her forthcoming The Last Full Measure (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), Rinaldi's Tacy Stryker is a protagonist who is a clear-eyed eyewitness to the events around the critical Battle of Gettysburg, a conflict which changes her family and the nation forever. In her surprising climax, Rinaldi shows how David's sense of honor leads him to an unexpected act, one of great courage and yet one which is, like many deeds of war, perhaps meaningless outside the framework of conflict.

Rinaldi gets inside her main character and skillfully lets the historical events flow around her in a way that is historically accurate and yet natural. Her plot unfolds briskly but not without the detail that heightens the reader's sense of being there and seeing it as only an impressionable and resilient young woman could.

The War between Us: The Totally Made-Up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish

Only in our house, thought Amanda MacLeish, could a Friday night family Monopoly game turn into the Civil War.

And as that ironically named "Family Night" Monopoly game plays itself out to an aborted ending, we see that the MacLeish family is already a house divided. Mom grimly plays for blood; thirteen-year-old Steffi suffers through the Friday ritual in bored-teen martyrdom; Dad remains annoyingly cheerful as he steadily wins, as always; and fifth-grader Amanda tries to keep the peace as the game disintegrates into another of her parents' frequent quarrels.

Things fall apart quickly for Amanda as her father suddenly moves out of the house. At first Amanda blames her mother's inexplicable crankiness for the break. But when Amanda makes an early morning bike trip to visit her father at his motel, she is hurt and bewildered when he dad keeps the chain on the door and orders her to wait outside while he dresses to drive her right back home. Mystified at this behavior, she hears Steffi's suspicion that there is another woman involved, the truth of which is confirmed when, waiting for a classmate at the community center, she watches her father greet a pretty blond with a private but familiar kiss.

Amanda finds little comfort in the awkward silence at home and gradually becomes estranged from her best friend Beth because of her inability to talk about her family's breakup to anyone. Instead she throws herself into her social studies assignment to compose a Civil War-era journal of a Maryland farm girl named Polly Mason. In Amanda's narrative Polly, too, realizes that she lives in a house divided when her older brother Thomas volunteers for the Union Army and her fifteen-year-old brother Jeb joins a Rebel regiment in the Army of Virginia. When her brothers are listed as wounded in the early battles of the war, Amanda has Polly disguise herself as a young Paul Mason and set out on foot to search the scattered tent hospitals near the battlefield, hoping to bring her brothers home and reunite her fractured family.

Polly does learn that her brothers are alive, but not whole. Thomas has lost a leg, and Jeb an arm, and when they come together again, Polly sees that the Masons will remain a family, but a much changed one. As Amanda writes Polly's story, she also gains insight into her own altered family. A field trip to Gettysburg, with her dad surprisingly along as a chaperon, helps Amanda to make her own separate peace with Beth, with her father, and with her future in her own broken but still loving family.

In her new novel The Totally Made-up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish notable author Claudia Mills carries off a real tour-de-force. Skillfully balancing the dual story lines of Amanda and Polly within the framework of a fifth grade class working toward a performance at the end of its Civil War unit, Claudia Mills reveals Amanda's growing understanding of the meaning of her family's split as much through her journal writing in Polly's voice as through her own experiences. The journal entries are believable as the work of a talented fifth grade writer, and in an admirable parallel of the "house divided" theme, Mills also shows continuing racial tension between two boys in Amanda's class as they read their Civil War journals aloud. It is an altogether remarkable piece of writing with few false notes, as Mills skillfully weaves the meaningful subplots into an integral part of Amanda MacLeish's own memorable story.

All this may seem a weighty structure for a middle reader novel, but as reviewer Liz Rosenberg puts it, "Despite its somber themes, Claudia Mills’s newest novel sparkles like a glass of ginger ale, peppery and sweet. Spirited Amanda blunders through mistakes that only make us love her more. A splash of American history, a dollop of friendship, a pinch of philosophy, humor, pathos, even a dash of romance --The Totally Made-Up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish has something for every young reader."

Clash of the Ironclads: Iron Thunder: The Battle Between the Monitor and the Merrimac, A Civil War Novel by Avi

Newbery author Avi, whose The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle (Summer Reading Edition) took the reader to sea as a able seaman of 1832, returns with an up-close and personal story of the transformational battle of the Monitor and Merrimac, ironclads which forever changed warfare at sea.
In Iron Thunder (I Witness) we meet thirteen-year-old Tom Carroll, taken to the Brooklyn Naval Yard by his war-widowed mother, who hopes to find him a job to help the family survive the early years of the Civil War. Small but nimble, Tom is hired for seventy-five cents a week to be the errand boy to John Ericsson, designer of the Union's first ironclad warship, to be christened The Monitor, but known as "Ericsson's Folly" among the Navy Yard workers who doubt it will float. Still, Tom's family desperately needs his small salary to supplement his mother's earnings as washerwoman, and Tom soon becomes Ericsson's ship's boy as the unlikely craft takes shape.

Soon, however, Tom realizes that he is being shadowed by a couple of men who offer him gold coins and steak dinners in return for information about Ericsson's invention. Tom suspects that the two are "Copperheads," Southern sympathizers who are spying to learn if the Union's ironclad is a threat to the South's blockade-breaking Merrimac. Fearing that he himself could be hanged as a spy if caught with the men, Tom begins to spend his nights below deck on the half-finished ironclad, but when, just as the Monitor is to be launched and sail southward, Tom tries to slip home to tell his mother good-bye, only the brawling ability of Tom's streetwise Irish friends helps him escape the Southern spies.

At last, the Monitor begins its slow and perilous journey to Hampton Roads, nearly sinking partway in a powerful squall. Tom is both fearful and exhilarated when he sees the destruction caused by the Merrimac's first outing against the Union's blockading warships. The battle which follows on the next day, when the little Monitor steams bravely into the path of the advancing Merrimac, is thunderous and terrifying as the two ironclads fire their mighty cannons at almost point-blank range. With the failure of the Monitor's speaking tubes, Tom Carroll is thrown into a pivotal position as he relays commands from Captain Worden in the pilot house to the men firing the ship's two cannons from within their iron-sided revolving turret. After four hours, the Merrimac begins to take on water and withdraws from the battle, allowing the crew and captain of the Monitor to claim a partial victory.

Avi's interweaving of historic fact and personalities makes for a tightly written adventure story, with the slightly fictionalized Tom Carroll a believable first-person observer of the sequence of events which may have changed the outcome of the Civil War. This first title in a proposed I Witness series is well-written and documented with period photographs, drawings, and maps, and museum objects taken from the Monitor itself. Iron Thunder (I Witness) is a an engrossing adventure story which would also make great collateral reading along with a middle school Civil War unit.

Indeed, in this book Avi offers a work of fiction with the supporting back matter of an historical work. An extensive glossary is included, along with author's notes which include information about the new USS Monitor Center Museum, which displays the turret and pilot house and numerous objects recovered from the sunken wreck of the ship and offers the visitor a full-sized replica of the vessel and a simulation of the momentous battle itself. A bibliography, including the full account of the confrontation by the surviving Union officers, is also appended.