By Paul Fleischman
The Civil War's first major battle, told one voice at a time by sixteen people from every side of it.
There's no single narrator. Sixteen people speak in turn, a chapter or two apiece: a Southern boy itching to enlist, a Northern girl, a free Black man, an army doctor, a mapmaker, a general's aide, a woman who follows the troops, a person held in slavery. Almost all of them expect the war to be short and glorious. You watch them get pulled toward the same July day in 1861, the First Battle of Bull Run, each still sure of how it will go. Then the battle comes. It is nothing like they pictured, and their voices carry you through the chaos and the grief afterward from all sides at once.
This one sits at the top of the trail, and it does something the others can't: it holds every side of the war in the same book. A reader hears the Confederate and the Union soldier, the enslaved and the free, the eager and the grieving, and has to sit with the fact that people on all sides believed they were right. Sixteen threads is a lot to hold, which is why it's the stretch pick, meant for the oldest and strongest readers on the trail. Performed aloud with a full cast, it's about the best classroom piece I know of for this period.