Civil War: Home

High-spirited, beautiful Susan Chilmark, fourteen, vows to do something meaningful to support the Confederacy during the Civil War.  Despite the wishes of her mother, Susan and her best friend, Connie, collect silk dresses from all the ladies of Richmond to make a balloon that will be used to spy on the Yankees.

But the issues behind the war aren't as obvious as Susan thinks.  When she meets her dashing, scandalous older brother and discovers why he was banished from the family, Susan unlocks a Pandora's box of secrets that forces her to rethink and challenge the very system she was born into.  Does she have the courage to do what is right even though it may hurt the ones she loves?

Gary Paulsen introduces readers to Charley Goddard in his latest novel, Soldier's Heart. Charley goes to war a boy, and returns a changed man, crippled by what he has seen. In this captivating tale Paulsen vividly shows readers the turmoil of war through one boy's eyes and one boy's heart, and gives a voice to all the anonymous young men who fought in the Civil War

Rose is an orphan who has been living in New York City, luxuriously but lovelessly. When she is twelve years old, she is packed off to live with relatives in an old farm house in Ontario. Among these strange and exuberant relatives, Rose is lonely and unhappy... until one day she discovers an old root cellar- and stumbles into the world of the 1860's. There she becomes involved with Susan and her brother Will. Time as reached through the root cellar moves differently than it does in the world of Rose's Aunt Nan and soon Susan and Will are grown and Will has failed to return from the Civil War. Rose and Susan must journey to Washington, D. C. to rescue him. Rose's knowledge of present day New York becomes useful in this 1864 trip. Rose must learn to function in both time periods and, to her amazement, the previously unloved girl finds love in each period. As the book continues we learn a great deal about the Civil War era.

First published in 1895, America's greatest novel  of the Civil War was written before 21-year-old  Stephen Crane had "smelled even the powder of a  sham battle." But this powerful psychological  study of a young soldier's struggle with the  horrors, both within and without, that war strikes the  reader with its undeniable realism and with its  masterful descriptions of the moment-by-moment riot  of emotions felt by me under fire. Ernest  Hemingway called the novel an American classic, and  Crane's genius is as much apparent in his sharp,  colorful prose as in his ironic portrayal of an episode  of war so intense, so immediate, so real that the  terror of battle becomes our own ... in a  masterpiece so unique that many believe modern American  fiction began with Stephen Crane.