And One for All

Set in three turbulent years of an extraordinary decade, the '60s, Nelson's new novel achieves its grace by portraying an impersonal, often abstract war in Vietnam as it affected American families in the most personal of ways. Geraldine, more than a little in love with her cousin Sam, and half-irritated, half-charmed by her older brother Wing, quietly observes the changes in her family, the shifts in viewpoints that send one boy off to war and the other off to peace marches in Washington. Larger issues are encompassed in telling details: Wing, the poor student, enlists in the Marines after miserably failing (so he thinks) a test he has worked hard to pass; Sam, Wing's tutor, whose own father died in a previous war, is headed for college and is therefore exempt from the draft. When Wing dies, it is Geraldine's own pilgrimage to Washington that heals the wounds that have begun to divide her family. Broader in scope than the author's Devil Storm or The 25? Miracle (but delivering little that is new to the rhetoric of war and peace), this novel saliently sets the habits and legends of a family against the crisis in a nation's conscience. A Richard Jackson Book. Ages 11-13. (Apr.)