Johnny Tremain

Fourteen year old Johnny Tremain is the most talented apprentice in a Boston silversmith's shop in 1773, proud and quick tempered, until a jealous rival apprentice tricks him into using a cracked crucible that shatters and burns his hand, crippling it and ending his future as a silversmith overnight. Cast out of his trade and struggling to find work with a ruined hand, Johnny takes a job delivering the Observer, a Whig newspaper, where he falls in with Rab Silsbee and is drawn steadily into the politics of Sam Adams, John Hancock and the growing resistance to British rule. Johnny takes part in the Boston Tea Party, carries messages between Patriot leaders, and watches the crisis tighten around the city through the British occupation and the buildup to open war, his own bitterness over his ruined hand slowly widening into a bigger anger at the injustice of colonial rule itself. He falls in and out of an uneasy friendship with a British officer, Lieutenant Stranger, who treats him with more decency than most, complicating the simple loyalties a reader might expect from a war story. The novel closes at the Battle of Lexington, where Rab is mortally wounded; a Patriot doctor examining Johnny afterward offers to operate on his damaged hand so that he, too, can finally take up a soldier's musket, and the book ends with Johnny accepting, ready to fight in the war that has just begun.

It moves briskly for a book this dense with real history, folding Revere, Adams and Hancock into Johnny's own story rather than lecturing about them, and its combination of personal grievance and national crisis gives a young reader a way into the Revolution through one boy's anger and growth rather than through dates alone. Parents should expect a serious, sometimes violent account of war building, appropriate for confident middle grade readers rather than the very young.