A Long Walk to Water

 

Park, L. S. (2010). A Long Walk to Water: Based on a True Story. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Genre: Realistic Fiction

    This book follows two children from southern Sudan: Silva and Nya. Each chapter begins with Nya's story in an orange font in 2009, followed by Silva's in black between 1985 and 2009. Silva was attending school when soldiers attacked his village. The majority of the book is about his journey to a refugee camp in Ethiopia and the fear and loss he endures. Nya's family migrates between their home village and a camp; they have to dig for water in their home village, but the land dries up during winter, so they go to a camp near a lake. One day, men come to the village with big machines and begin to dig for water. In the latter half of the book, Silva is forced to go to another refugee camp in Kenya, then another where he is selected to go to the United States. In the United States, he is able to get an education, reunite with his father in Sudan, and create an organization to help build wells in villages that need it, including Nya's village where the two meet.

     The diversity in this story is ethnic and multicultural. Here, we see the story of two children who lived through callous times in a wartorn Sudan. We are led through the children's cultures and backgrounds in the book. At the end of the book, we see Silva is a real person who endured everything we read. Park was acting as a catalyst for his story to be told, interviewing him multiple times. Although some parts of the book are dramatized, through her own admission in the author's note, she put in the work to research these topics to tell as authentic of a story as possible.