The Shadow of My Father's Hand: A Boy's Civil War Journal

Written by Craig Crist-Evans
Illustrated by Anna Rich

It’s 1864 and the Civil War is still raging. A fourteen-year-old boy in Tennessee is keeping a journal. He’s writing it all down—from witnessing his father’s death at the Battle of Gettysburg to wondering how he will ever be able to get the crops in and care for his grieving mother and little sister. It helps that he has a best friend, John, a freed slave. But not everyone accepts their friendship, not in this border state where some are against slavery, but some are for it.

This haunting personal war story, conveyed through a poignant narrative poem, is at once a story of family, of friendship, of the horrors of war—and of one boy’s struggle to survive and grow up.

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