I wasn't going to cry ...

But I did.


I just read Pink and Say (Polacco, 1994).


This is a story about two injured boys fighting in the Civil War on the Union side.  One is white, and one is black.  One wants to continue fighting, and one does not.  One is educated, and one is not. One will lose everything, and one will gain an entirely new way to look at the world ... and an unforgettable story.


Here's the line that got me: "I know this story to be true because ..."


And here's the other line that got me: "This is the hand, that has touched the hand ..."


Read this book to your students.


Pink and Say has obvious teaching implications for American History. But I'd consider it, too, for:

• language arts, to study dialect and narrative structure
• a war unit for any social studies or literature class
• studying differences (relevant in any subject)
• the psychology of fear
• health sciences

This book would make an incredible companion piece to A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.  Publisher's Weekly begins their starred review thus: "This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone's civil war goes beyond even the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare."


Our students often tell us they want to read books that are relevant.  And we know from experience they love to have their minds opened to new ideas.  Pink has something to say to us.


Have tissues ready.