Soldier's Heart
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Gary Paulsen |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | Being the Story of the Enlistment and Due Service of the Boy Charley Goddard |
| Publisher | Delacorte Books for Young Readers |
| Honors | |
| In June 1861, when the Civil War began, Charley Goddard left his farm and enlisted in the First Minnesota Volunteers. He was fifteen. He didn’t rightly know what a “shooting war” meant, or what he was fighting for. All he knew was that he didn’t want to miss out on a great adventure.
The shooting war meant the horror of combat and the wild luck of survival. It meant knowing how it feels to cross a field toward the enemy, waiting for fire. Waiting for death. And Charley learned “This is how it’s done.” When he entered the service he was a boy. When he came… | |
In June 1861, when the Civil War began, Charley Goddard left his farm and enlisted in the First Minnesota Volunteers. He was fifteen. He didn’t rightly know what a “shooting war” meant, or what he was fighting for. All he knew was that he didn’t want to miss out on a great adventure.
The shooting war meant the horror of combat and the wild luck of survival. It meant knowing how it feels to cross a field toward the enemy, waiting for fire. Waiting for death. And Charley learned “This is how it’s done.”
When he entered the service he was a boy. When he came back he was different. He was only nineteen, but he was a man said to have a soldier’s heart.
Battle by battle, Gary Paulsen shows one boy’s 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.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
In spare, almost biblical prose, Gary Paulsen writes of the horrors of combat in a Civil War novella that puts a powerful, more contemporary spin on Stephen Crane’s classic The Red Badge of Courage. Based on the life of a real boy, it tells the story of Charley Goddard, who lies his way into the Union Army at the age of 15. Charley has never been anyplace beyond Winona, Minnesota, and thinks war would be a great adventure. And it is—at first—as his regiment marches off through cheering crowds and pretty, flag-waving girls. But then comes the battle. Charley screams, “Make it stop now!” disbelieving that anything so horrible could be real. Paulsen is unsparing in the details of what actually happens on the battlefield: the living men suddenly blown into pieces, the agony and fear, the noise and terror, the stinking corpses. After many battles, Charley is wounded and sent home an old man before he is 20, his will to live destroyed by combat fatigue—leaving him with a “soldier’s heart.” Paulsen has received the Margaret A. Edwards Award, the ALAN Award, and several Newbery Honor awards for previous work, but this superb, small masterpiece transcends any of his earlier titles in its remarkable, memorable intensity and power. (Ages 12 to 15) —Patty Campbell
