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From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)

Coming from the rough and tumble of street life in the Bowery, 12-year-old Charley expects to avenge his brother's Gettysburg death with ease. Being connected with the Union Army is different than Charley expected, just as the horrors of real war are nothing like the battles in his neighborhood. Charley learns about courage from Granny Bent and because of the opportunity he has to prove he isn't a coward. (Age 12 and older)

CCBC Choices 1987 © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 1987. Used with permission.

From Publisher's Weekly

September 30, 1987
Fighting is important to Charley Quinn, 12, a street-tough New York Bowery Boy who runs away from his Irish-Catholic home to join the Union forces in Virginia. But war proves much more horrible than he'd thoughtso terrible, in fact, that he deserts, giving himself the disparaging name "Skedaddle.'' Afterward, Charley takes refuge in the mountains with Granny Bent, a midwife with her own secret loyalties. This well-crafted, somewhat episodic novel makes the point that fighting brings honor, and cowardice, shame. The settingsfrom the Bowery, to the battlefield, to Granny's cabinare quite powerful. These, along with Charley's disillusionment and change, give this novel depth and make it one of Beatty's best. Ages 10-14.

From AudioFile Magazine

Twelve-year-old Charley Quinn thinks war is going to be swell when he runs away from his home in the New York Bowery to become a drummer boy in the Civil War. He can't imagine that anything could make a coward out of a street-tough Irish lad. It's not war, in the end, but a self-imposed exile in the backwoods of Virginia that teaches Charley what courage really means in this novel, winner of the prestigious Scott O'Dell Award for historical juvenile fiction. Narrator Jeff Woodman has a repertoire of authentic accents, from lower New York to mountain hillbilly, that pull the listener into each scene of this action-packed adventure. M.C. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine