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Monday, January 15, 2001

Soldier's Heart - by Gary Paulsen

Soldier's Heart: being the story of the enlistment and due service of the boy Charley Goddard in the First Minnesota Volunteers : a novel of the Civil War - by Gary Paulsen

Charley Goddard, age 15, knew one thing, for sure. There was going to be a shootin' war and if a man didn't step lively, he'd miss it!

When young men go away to war, most of them are aware that they might be killed in action. What they rarely imagine is that they might survive. But survive, changed.

In the Vietnam War, when young men had people trying to kill them, saw their close friends and comrades dying around them and had to kill, and kill again, they sometimes came back, wounded psychologically as well as physically. People called this phenomenon, "post traumatic stress syndrome". During World War II when men and boys were torn apart in bloody carnage on the beaches of Normandy, they said the survivors had "Battle fatigue". In World War I, as young men coughed their lungs out with poison gas and were bombed senseless in the trenches, they called it "Shell shock".

In the civil war, they said you had a soldier's heart.

Charley Goddard, age 15, runs away to fight in the Civil War. He earns his soldiers heart.

Based on a real person, this is Soldier's Heart : Being the Story of the Enlistment and Due Service of the Boy Charley Goddard in the First Minnesota Volunteers by Gary Paulsen

2001 Evergreen Award Nomination

Whirligig - by Paul Fleischman

Whirligig - by Paul Fleischman

"We can never know all the consequence of our actions." Every action, whether selfish or selfless touches so many others in unimaginable ways.
At different ends of the country four very different people find inspiration and hope when they encounter four separate magical wooden toys; whirligigs. They're a Maine teenager stumbling into womanhood, a distraught Miami street sweeper, an Asian-American girl about to rebel and a San Diego teenager helping her grandmother search for her roots.
But how would they feel if they knew who had built the whirligigs? You see, the builder is Brent Bishop, a sixteen-year-old boy trying desperately to atone for a thoughtless act that had killed an innocent girl. You'll find "Lea Zamora" on each of his whirligigs.
Certainly Brent can never bring back Lea's life. But can his whirligigs do something to spread her spirit? Those who encounter them will never know who built the whirling wooden toys, and Brent will never know who they touched. Can anything good ever come out of a senseless tragedy? You decide!
Read Whirligig. Discover how every action, whether selfish or selfless touches so many others in ways we can never understand.

2001 Evergreen Award Nomination

Within Reach: My Everest Story - by Mark Pfetzer and Jack Galvin

Within Reach: My Everest Story - by Mark Pfetzer and Jack Galvin

Ask the audience what they were doing when they were 14. If it's a younger group, ask them what they think they'll be doing. Wait for the answers. Volunteer your own if the audience isn't very responsive. Then ask what they were doing (or will be doing) at 15, and at 16. Then show them one of the pictures in the book of Mark Pfetzer.]

See this guy? His name is Mark Pfetzer. He's a real guy. A few years ago, when he was 14 years old, he was the youngest person ever to climb to the top of Mount Pisco, Peru. When he was 15 he climbed to the summit of Mount Rainier and he was the youngest person to climb to the summit of Ama Dablam, Nepal. When he was 16, he decided to take on Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world. It nearly killed him.

How does an ordinary kid (He's not rich or famous and neither are his parents) get to do such extraordinary things? How does he get out of school to climb the highest mountains all over the world? It's all here: Read his true adventures in Within Reach: My Everest Story by Mark Pfetzer and Jack Galvin.

Kim Lafferty, King County Library System

2001 Evergreen Award Nomination

The Wreckers - by Iain Lawrence

The Wreckers - by Iain Lawrence

It's been said that, during the 1800s, quaint little seaside villages in Cornwall were sometimes home to people who rejoiced in the storms. People who got down on their knees and prayed to God for the driving rain and the crashing waves. "Good" townspeople who would sit on the cliffs and wait. The would wait for the ships struggling through the storms, searching for a safe harbor. Tall ships like this one [Show book cover]. When a ship was spotted, they would raise their lamps, light their fires and provide beacons that led these ships onto treacherous rocks and certain destruction. All for the chance of finding and keeping the treasures that washed ashore from the wreck.

The Isle of Skye was such a ship. Lost in a storm, she gratefully followed the lights that suddenly appeared in the black night. When she hit the rocks called The Tombstones, John Spencer, who had been travelling on board with his father for the first time, knew he would die at sea. But he made it to shore. Then, when he awoke on the beach and witnessed one of his shipmates who had also made it alive to shore, being drowned by the local villagers, John was sure he'd be killed, too. But when the whole bloodthirsty mob chased him through the countryside to a broken down block house where a legless man told him that his father was still alive, too, John discovered the will to live. The will to find his father. The will to survive this quaint little seaside town that thrived on death, destruction and the determination that there would be no survivors.
Read the Wreckers, a nasty but true part of history, and a well-told adventure by Iain Lawrence.

2001 Evergreen Award Nomination