A very slow book that just never gets up to speed. I was bored reading it as I know my students would be. However, if you have a child who is going through a rough divorce this might help them in some small little way. ( )

Amanda’s parents separate early in the story, and she and her sister are dealing with it in different ways. Amanda’s way of dealing with it is to plunge herself into writing a fictional journal about a girl during the US Civil War as part of a class project. This character, Polly, has a family separated by the war because her two brothers are fighting for opposite sides. Meanwhile, Amanda’s parents are on opposite sides, and Amanda and her best friend are finding themselves on opposite sides as well. The parallel stories are each engaging, but it’s Amanda’s tender innocent struggle to understand her family’s new dynamic that sweeps the reader along. There’s some question about why the father moves out, and the suspense of uncovering that answer makes the novel a page-turner.

While dealing with her parents' separation and her best friend's distance, Amanda is able to work out some of her anxiety through her fifth-grade project--writing a diary from the point of view of a ten-year-old girl whose brothers fight on opposite sides in the Civil War ( )