Braving the Fire

Rating:
Summary: Can YA readers really brave the fire of war?
Review: The Civil War is in its climax, and Gem Bridwell, a fourteen-year-old boy, gets caught up in the "glory" of war that surrounds him in the small farming town of Gaithersburg, Maryland. Gem's father, a Union officer gets injured earlier in the war, but the call for duty by young men to take a stand to keep the Union in tact returns him to the battlefield. Trapped between his pa's love to keep America unified and Gem's grandfather's view that the southern way of life needs to be preserved, with the atrocities of war brought home to Gem, he runs off with his boyhood friend Hank to find the "glory" in war. War teaches Gem and Hank quickly that playing war in Gaithersburg is not like facing down the Rebs when you hear that rebel yell and bayonets charging down on you. War makes a man out of Gem and when the smoke finally clears, only he can find his "glory" in the drastically changed America.

In Braving the Fire by John B. Severance, did an adequate job of depicting a young man's journey to find manhood and define himself in the changing world around him, but the soul searching to find glory left me with an overly romanticized depiction of the Civil War. Making war simplistic shadows the pain and torment that it brings to the people and country and with Gems journey to find "glory", war is purely just romanticized to depict a harrowing journey for the young adult reader.