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A LIGHT IN THE STORM: The Civil War Diary of Amelia
Martin
by Karen Hesse
Scholastic
ISBN: 0590567330
Ages 9-12
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Although only 15 years old (and about to
turn 16 in May 1861), Amelia Martin has lots of grown-up responsibilities.
In the morning, she teaches schoolchildren, then goes home to the
Fenwick Island lighthouse, where she watches to make sure that ships
do not crash along the stormy Delaware coast.
Every day Amelia hears more bad news about the North and South, which
are close to Civil War. The conflict hits close to home: Delaware
is a border state, full of both Union and Confederacy sympathizers.
Amelia's pro-North father once got in trouble for helping a runaway
slave, and her pro-South mother dislikes the new president, Abe Lincoln.
When the lighthouse keeper raises a pro-Union flag, hardly anyone
shows up to pledge allegiance.
Karen Hesse, whose novel OUT OF THE DUST won the 1998 Newbery Medal,
gives
Amelia the calm but concerned voice of a girl devoted to her work.
The book's historical photos reveal that the Fenwick Island lighthouse
really existed, and readers can imagine the chilly room where Amelia
writes in her diary while looking out to sea. However, the emotional
effect of this story is weak, even when Amelia's boyfriend Daniel
enlists in the Union Army and Amelia's parents threaten to divorce.
Amelia seems too distant from the personal events she describes.
On the other hand, this diary-novel gives a good sense of 19th century
interests and hardships. Hesse's characters read Harriet Beecher Stowe's
UNCLE TOM'S CABIN and Charles Darwin's THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, two
controversial books of the period, and they cope with wet weather
and pre-electricity oil lamps in the lighthouse. Best of all, Hesse
shows that not everyone in the North was antislavery and that not
everyone in the South was a slave owner. Even in a neighborly town
or a small family like Amelia's, people would disagree on how to resolve
the tension between the mainly industrial North (where workers earned
wages from bosses) and the mainly agricultural South (where slaves
worked free and their owners kept all the income). A LIGHT IN THE
STORM suggests how a teenage girl of 1861 might have responded to
a major political crisis.
--- Reviewed by Nathalie op de Beeck
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