Crossing Stones

On this day in history, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, World War I ended in 1918. America’s involvement came late in the conflict, and, in fact, most of the books written about World War I for young readers have originated in England. But Crossing Stones by Helen Frost, written entirely in verse, is the story of the affect of the war on two Midwestern families who send sons away to fight. Muriel, Emma, Ollie, and Frank each tell their stories in language so precise and beautiful that the reader gets swept up in the events of the time—fighting the war, the flu pandemic, and the suffragette movement. Although from another era, these characters emerge as very real and relatable in their passion for life and their moral conflicts. To create such living, breathing figures, Helen Frost drew on family history and personal memories from her childhood in Brookings, South Dakota. Frost’s poetry is so fluid and immediate that only after breathlessly reading until the end of the story did I even become aware of the strict poetic structure used for each character’s voice. In Crossing Stones Helen Frost alternates free verse with cupped-hand sonnets to add dimension to each character. Consequently, the literary craft of this novel is as brilliant as any we have for young readers. This book demonstrates the same attention to word choice as Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust. If you want young reader’s grades five through eight to truly understand what Armistice Day means, introduce them to Crossing Stones. History, poetry, human relations, the sadness or war, the resilience of the human spirit—all are conveyed in a novel that runs just under two hundred pages. From my point of view, Crossing Stones stands as one of our finest literary novels for children written in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Here’s a passage from Crossing Stones: