Booktalking "Numbering All the Bones" by Ann Rinaldi

Eulinda is a 13-year-old girl searching for freedom during the Civil War. That didn't happen for her younger brother Zeke, who was recently sold to another master.

Eulinda is also perpetually in search of her older brother, Neddy, who joined the Northern war effort. Some African Americans are fighting with guns while others get flogged as slaves. It's a double-edged world.

Eulinda has many adventures aboard her horse, Tippo. She is atypical for an African American girl of her time in her situation: she can read. Eulinda is ecstatic to join Clara Barton in her work to create hospitals for wounded soldiers. She wants to do what she can to help.

Skeletons and daily death tolls numbering in the hundreds haunt soldiers of the Civil War.

Numbering All the Bones by Ann Rinaldi, 2002

I love the earth-tones of the cover; the girl's head divides the corn fields and plantations of the South from the gravestones in the cemetery and the deaths caused by the war. The dialects in the book also gives the reader a feel of what the slang of the time was like.