Searching for General Lee

In this fast-paced and engaging novel for young adults, Barrett Dowell captures the drama of the pivotal Second Battle of Manassas from the point of view of a Virginia youth who travels from his home outside Warrenton with an important message for General Robert E. Lee. Chadwick Curtis is not a soldier, and he has yet to make up his mind on what it means for a state to secede from the Union. Like many members of plantation families, he values his way of life and resists the Unions impulse to change it. But he also grapples with moral questions: Slavery, his father said on his deathbed, is wrong; freeing the family slaves is the moral thing to do. War, Chadwick comes to believe, is also wrong, for the costs are to grave and the spoils to hard won. In the week it takes him to ride north in search of the famed general, Chadwick is witness to the brutality of war, to the courage of those who fight it, and the growth of his own character and that of his companion, his eleven -year- old brother Brett. Carole Sargent