No Man's Land

Gr. 5-9. At 14, Thrasher Magee lies about his age and joins the Okefenokee Rifles to fight in the Confederate Army in 1861. For many young soldiers, like Thrasher's friend Baylor, war is a grand adventure, but Thrasher is driven by his need to prove his manhood to his father and himself. There is far less battlefield slaughter than in Gary Paulsen's Soldier's Heart (Booklist's 1998 Top of the List for Youth Fiction); the focus here is on the waiting, the boredom, and the bonds and bickering between the individual soldiers (one of whom turns out to be a girl). In a moving chapter, they arrive too late for a battle; their gruesome job is to bury the dead, and they are surprised by their horror and sorrow. Their fury at the Yankees is transformed when they meet individual enemy soldiers sneaking across the lines to bury their dead: the two sides talk, tease, and play cards. By the time they do fight, they are far less eager, though the screaming battle in which Thrasher loses an arm is the climax of the story. If Thrasher is sometimes too articulate about his fight for manhood, his final return home to his father's embrace is a melancholy closing that rings true. As in her great nonfiction photo-essay Growing Up in Coal Country (1996), Bartoletti grounds her story in careful historical research, and in an afterword she talks about her union of fact and imagination. - Hazel Rochman; 176p-