Bull Run

By: Paul Fleischman  

This book, Bull Run, is written in the perspective of sixteen different characters. Colonel Oliver Brattle, Shem Suggs, Flora  Wheelworh, Toby Boyce, Virgil Peavey, Dr. William Rye, Judah Jenkins and Carlotta King are the Southern characters. Lily Malloy, Gideon Adams, James Dacy, Nathaniel Epp, Dietrich Herz, General Irvin McDowell, A. B. Tillbury and Edmund Upwing are the Northern characters.

Each person tells their side of the story at the battle of Bull Run. They rotate each chapter so every person has their own chapter to tell what happens, but they each get more than one turn. Toby Boyce said in one chapter, "I was eleven years old and desperate to kill a Yankee before the supply ran out." Since he was only eleven, he wasn't allowed in the army, so to have any chance to kill a Yankee, he joined the army's band and played the fife for them. 

There's people like Toby and then there's people like Gideon Adams, an escaped slave. He tried to join the army but wasn't allowed to because of the color of his skin, black. His mother was white but his father was black so he just looked like a white person, just a little bit darker so they almost let him in but then they saw his hair. Then the army realized he was black so he cut his hair and dressed up as a white man. And he joined the army. He says, "To be a Negro living in the midst of whites, unknown to them, is to be a ghost spying on the living." 

That is just a couple little things showing who some of the characters really are and what their lifestyle is like. This book is great, it is the Civil War time period and this is the very first battle of the Civil War. At first, I didn't really think I would like the book to be honest. But I ended up really enjoying it. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes this kind of stuff. I like it a lot.