Fourteen-year-old Thrasher Magee has never felt that he was man enough in his father’s eyes. Too frightened to help when an alligator attacks Pap, his feelings inadequacy are reinforced. Feeling he can no longer sit at his family’s table, and looking for a way to prove—at least to himself—that he can be strong and brave, Thrasher lies about his age and joins Georgia’s Okefinokee Rifle Company, to fight with the Rebel Army in the Civil War. To Thrasher and many of the others with whom he has enlisted, the politics of slavery mean nothing—they are all too poor to have ever owned slaves themselves—but they will fight for the right of the South to decide its own future. In the bordeom of camp, through the comradeship of his fellow soldiers, and on the horrific haze of the battlefield, Thrasher discovers that to be a man has more to do with understanding and compassion that it does with bravery, and that courage itself takes many different forms. An author’s note and bibliography provide historical background on real events and occurrences on which the author based her fictional characters. (Ages 10-13)

Gr. 5-9. At 14, Thrasher Magee lies about his age and joins the Okefenokee Rifles to fight in the Confederate Army in 1861. For many young soldiers, like Thrasher's friend Baylor, war is a grand adventure, but Thrasher is driven by his need to prove his manhood to his father and himself. There is far less battlefield slaughter than in Gary Paulsen's Soldier's Heart (Booklist's 1998 Top of the List for Youth Fiction); the focus here is on the waiting, the boredom, and the bonds and bickering between the individual soldiers (one of whom turns out to be a girl). In a moving chapter, they arrive too late for a battle; their gruesome job is to bury the dead, and they are surprised by their horror and sorrow. Their fury at the Yankees is transformed when they meet individual enemy soldiers sneaking across the lines to bury their dead: the two sides talk, tease, and play cards. By the time they do fight, they are far less eager, though the screaming battle in which Thrasher loses an arm is the climax of the story. If Thrasher is sometimes too articulate about his fight for manhood, his final return home to his father's embrace is a melancholy closing that rings true. As in her great nonfiction photo-essay Growing Up in Coal Country (1996), Bartoletti grounds her story in careful historical research, and in an afterword she talks about her union of fact and imagination. - Hazel Rochman; 176p-