By Joseph Bruchac
Two boys in 1777, a Quaker and an Abenaki, each afraid of the other, and the day they meet and nobody fires.
Summer 1777, upstate New York, with Burgoyne's army coming down and everyone choosing sides. Samuel Russell is a Quaker boy, and Quakers won't fight, which means his neighbors call his family cowards and Tories and he's beginning to wonder himself. Stands Straight is Abenaki, scouting for the British, and he has his own reasons to hate the white settlers. Bruchac tells it in alternating chapters, a boy at a time, so your child is inside both heads and afraid on both sides of the same road. Then the scouts come to the Quaker meeting house on a First Day and find the door open, no guns anywhere, everyone sitting in silence. What happens next is true. It's ninety-six pages and there's barely a wasted one.
This is the book that keeps the unit honest, and Bruchac, who is Abenaki, is the reason it can be. Native nations are usually a sentence in a Revolution unit, if that, and here your child spends half the book behind Abenaki eyes, in a war between two groups of white people where neither side is offering his people anything good. It's also the only book on the shelf where the answer to fear isn't courage-under-fire but an open door, which lands hard on a child who has just read four books where bravery meant a weapon or a message. The alternating chapters do something no explanation could: your child likes both boys before either one knows the other exists, so the meeting is unbearable and then it isn't.