A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park

This slim (121 pages) volume will leave a much larger impression on you.  Written in 2010 by Linda Sue Park, the Newbery Medal winner for her 2001 A Single Shard, it is a novelized version of a true story, set in the 1985 civil war in South Sudan.

It is told as two stories presented in alternating sections with different colored type, both set in the same place, but from the points of view of two different eleven years olds: Nya, a girl in 2008 and Salva, a boy in 1985.

The girl’s life is harsh, as she much trudge for two hours twice a day to get water for her family, but the boy’s is harrowing, a visceral, gritty saga of pain and survival in the chaos of war.  

Salva, is in fact, a real person, and the hardships he endured were faced by what came to be known as “the lost boys of Sudan,” who were separated from their families and were forced to flee across the African continent as refugees, facing wild animals, vicious armed rebels, and starvation.

The two stories come together in the end in a surprising and emotionally moving way.  

 A Long Walk to Water has a Lexile rating of 720 and can be enjoyed by both adults and kids around grade 4 and above.  I highly recommend it as it is highly uplifting and gives a strong statement about not giving up.  It is also instructional about Africa and conveys an important lesson about empathy for others. 

You can order the book from either of our Affiliate Bookstores, Better World Books or Barnes & Noble using the links on the blog or on the BLS Education Library page: https://blseducation.com/bls-education-library.

If you have any questions, you can email me at blseducationlibrary@gmail.com. 

I hope you enjoy A Long Walk to Water!