NUMBERING ALL THE BONES

A lovely story, rendered in spare prose by a major writer of historical fiction, Rinaldi’s (Girl in Blue, 2001, etc.) tale takes place in Georgia in 1864. Written in first-person flashback as a plainly told narrative set down at the request of Clara Barton, the main character tells us, it describes 13-year-old Eulinda Kellogg’s attempts to make herself “come true.” Eulinda, a house slave at a plantation close to the infamous Andersonville prison camp for Union soldiers, is the daughter of the plantation’s owner. Though this fact is known to all, including the master’s mean-spirited second wife, the owner has never legally acknowledged Eulinda. Her older brother has run away to join the Union forces—and may, in fact, be imprisoned at Andersonville—and a beloved younger one has been sold. A chance meeting with a man who offers her a role in helping to set the horrors of Andersonville to rights—that is, to bury the Union dead honorably and to turn it into a monument—provides Eulinda with the chance to do something important and meaningful with her life. There is much hard work to be done in this effort, and Eulinda encourages other freed blacks to help her clean and rebuild the place; in addition, as an educated young woman, she paints epitaphs so that all the fallen may be properly memorialized. In the process, she comes to meet and become secretary to Clara Barton, renowned in real life by this time as a champion of the rights of freed slaves and of the effort to pay tribute to the soldiers treated horribly at Andersonville. Eulinda is a beautifully realized character. She speaks plainly but always from the heart, and readers will be swept along by the drama and the history. The author provides a fascinating afterword in which she sets the facts and the many real-life characters in the novel in context and includes a bibliography featuring titles about Barton, Andersonville, and the Civil War. (Fiction. 10-14)