By Elizabeth George Speare
A young Jewish man burning with hatred for the Romans who killed his father slowly finds his rage undone by a teacher named Jesus, in the hills of Galilee.
Daniel bar Jamin is a young man in Roman-occupied Galilee who hates Rome with everything in him, and he has cause: the Romans crucified his father, grief killed his mother, and the horror left his little sister Leah trapped in fear, unable to leave the house. Daniel joins a band of outlaws in the hills led by a rebel called Rosh, certain that violence is the only answer and that a coming war will drive Rome out for good. But down in the villages a carpenter named Jesus has begun to teach, and his words, about loving even an enemy, about a different kind of kingdom, keep cutting across everything Daniel believes. The book is the slow, hard turning of a heart from vengeance toward something else, set in the exact time and place of the Gospels. It won the Newbery Medal.
This is the most grown-up book on the shelf, and the one that does the most, because it puts your child on the ground in first-century Galilee and lets them feel the Roman occupation the Gospels are set against, the taxes, the soldiers, the simmering wish for a warrior-messiah. Jesus appears not as a Sunday-school figure but as a teacher whose hardest sayings unsettle an angry young man, which makes the faith content land with real force. Speare writes with restraint and depth, and the central question, whether hatred or love is the stronger thing, is one an older reader can chew on for a long time. It rewards a mature 11-to-13-year-old and repays discussion.