Mom, don't panic. My brother Sam is not actually dead. Although, I will say, that might why I never read this book before. I'm rather fond of my actual brother Sam, and so this one was easy to skip. This is one of those books, however, that everyone (read: Vincent & Amanda) somehow assumes I read in school and I never did.
Let me pause here and say, this happens often (I had never read "Bridge to Terabithia" before I met Vincent, I still haven't read "Tuck Everlasting.") I really can't figure out why. It's NOT that I didn't read as a kid - you couldn't get me to put books down. (There were strict rules about when and if I could read at the table. Breakfast was fine. Dinner was out, unless there was a ball-game on that both mom & dad wanted to watch.)
And it isn't that I only read Baby Sitter's club books (although, I think those easily qualify as my first book-addiction). I read fabulous books: "Charlotte's Web", "Trumpeter Swan", "Island of the Blue Dolphins", "From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler", "The Secret Garden", "A Little Princess"...okay, I need to stop. I'm not sure how some books simply never came across my path.
So, back to the title book. I liked it. Quite a bit. I read it in one sitting (under a tree, on a college campus. Somehow, being on school grounds felt correct for this book). I appreciated that I actually didn't know until I read the postscript if the story was based on actual events or not. (I mean, I know that the Revolutionary War actually happened, but I didn't know if this particular story was true). It seems, in keeping with the best historical fiction, the characters are inventions, the events, not so much. I wish I had read this while I was studying the Revolutionary War in school. We live so long after those events, and America is so firmly established as "THE UNITED STATES." It's easy to assume that everyone in the colonies wanted to be a sovereign nation and forget how ruthless & underhand the people who were rebelling were.
Given the title, it's no secret that Sam will die at some point in the book, and there is an interesting tension that builds as you wait for it to happen. When it finally does, it was so much more upsetting that I expected it to be. I was grateful that while this is a book aimed towards children studying the war for the first time, the emotions & realities of what day to day living must have been like were not terribly whitewashed.
Pages: 225
Time to read: about 2 hours
Thumbs up/Thumbs down: Up! (wish I had read it when I was 11 though)
Next up: ''Jayne Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte
