Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.78 AVERAGE
3.78 AVERAGE
Regarding the actual book... It's pretty balanced. It focuses more on the peripheries of war like nursing and drummer boys rather than the morality.
The one paragraph that covers the motives for the war is too simplistic, saying the South wanted slavery and the North didn't... But, I do understand it's difficult to explain secession.
There was a Black character! & Clara Barton! Man, children's books so much more woke than adult fiction.
Cool beans, but god, so utterly boring still.
While back in time they meet Clara Barton, serve lunch to the soldiers and help in the hospital tent. They learn the harsh truth about the battle field and find their own bravery along the way.
Like Ghost Town at Sundown, there's an element of time travel in Civil War on Sunday. This time the children end up helping one of their relatives.
Although Sean I enjoyed the book, it was tough for my son to get through certain parts. I also think Civil War on Sunday was the point where Sean started to lose interest in the Magic Tree House series. He hasn't started learning about either the Revolutionary or the Civil War yet in school. So the frank (but not graphic) portrayal of the wounded was hard for him.
Much like Tonight on the Titanic, this entry in the series struggles to address real-world tragedy in the context of a book aimed at grade-schoolers. Tricky.
Osborne wisely avoids any analysis of the war's causes and simply presents its awful consequences: chaos, terror, pain, suffering, loss and finally numbness. It's all done in very broad strokes and the text keeps the reader at a safe distance from the carnage, but it's made clear that the entire experience has a profound impact on the two protagonists. Annie's altruism is sorely tested and Jack's naive impression of war being some kind of grand adventure is utterly obliterated.
Osbrone succeeded at a difficult task in writing this book and should be commended. It's definitely one of the stronger entries in the series to date.
Fortunately, Jack & Annie wind up at a field hospital run by none other than Clara Barton, and one of the nurses gives them a list of instructions re: how to be a nurse. The kids assist the nurses by delivering food to the injured men, following those instructions (#1: Be cheerful) as they do so. They learn about the Civil War and Clara Barton as they work, and they also get an emotional understanding of the devastation war causes.
This was better than the first book. I'm having trouble with the magical librarian bit, but that wasn't a huge part of the book, so. I appreciated the emotions Jack & Annie experienced at seeing how young some of the soldiers were, and the one scene where the kids were in danger (flying mortars) felt much more immediate.