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A review by catbrigand
Soldier's Heart: Being the Story of the Enlistment and Due Service of the Boy Charley Goddard in the First Minnesota Volunteers by Gary Paulsen
2.0
Perhaps what’s most remarkable about this experience is that I grew up a schoolkid in America in the 90s and never read a Gary Paulsen book until now. Color me underwhelmed.
This is a novella. This is a novella for middle grade readers. But being a middle grade novella doesn’t automatically preclude something from having depth. The fact that this doesn’t have that emotional depth makes me all the more critical. We have no feel for who Charley is as a person. While I appreciate the scenes that reveal his fragility and the fever that can come over a person from fighting for survival, it would have meant more if we had known more about what he was like before the war. This just didn’t work for me. I know I wasn’t the intended audience, but I was reading it to see if I should teach it to my class, and I’m not sure.
This is a novella. This is a novella for middle grade readers. But being a middle grade novella doesn’t automatically preclude something from having depth. The fact that this doesn’t have that emotional depth makes me all the more critical. We have no feel for who Charley is as a person. While I appreciate the scenes that reveal his fragility and the fever that can come over a person from fighting for survival, it would have meant more if we had known more about what he was like before the war. This just didn’t work for me. I know I wasn’t the intended audience, but I was reading it to see if I should teach it to my class, and I’m not sure.