By Linda Sue Park
Two true-to-life stories of Sudan braided together: a boy who walks for years to escape a war, and a girl who walks for hours every day just to fetch water.
In 1985, eleven-year-old Salva is sitting in his classroom in southern Sudan when gunfire sends everyone running, and just like that he is separated from his family and swept into the flood of refugees walking out of the war. What follows is years of walking, across deserts, away from lions and crocodiles and soldiers, burying friends along the way, toward a refugee camp and, eventually, an almost unimaginable second chance. Braided against his story is Nya, a girl in 2008, who walks eight hours every single day, there and back, twice, to bring her family water from a pond. Their two stories seem separate, until the very end, when they meet. It's based on the real life of Salva Dut, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan.
This is the summit's neighbor, and it's short, which is exactly why it can afford to be this heavy. In barely more than a hundred spare, unflinching pages, Linda Sue Park hands your child a true story about war, survival, and the plainest human need, water, and trusts them to sit with it. It asks the most emotional maturity of anything below the very top of the trail: the events are real, the losses are real, and the book doesn't soften them, but it's written with such restraint that it never tips into despair, and it ends in genuine, earned hope. A reader who's climbed this far is ready for a book that treats them like someone who can handle the truth, and this one does, and rewards them for it.