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  • Clara and Davie: The True Story of Young Clara Barton by Patricia Polacco
  • Elizabeth Bush
Polacco, Patricia. Clara and Davie: The True Story of Young Clara Barton; written and illus. by Patricia Polacco. Scholastic, 2014. [34p]. ISBN 978-0-545-35477-6 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R 6-9 yrs.

Drawing on stories from her extended family, Polacco recounts the formative childhood of distant cousin Clara Barton, the “angel” of the Civil War battlefield and founder of the American Red Cross. Born in 1821, Clara grew up motherless in a large family of siblings and formed a particular attachment to her older brother Davie. Every little girl’s image of the ideal brother, Davie championed Clara against the stricter discipline of their sensible sisters, taught her to embrace nature with gusto, defended her when she was teased or censured for her lisp, and recognized her affinity with animals and innate talent for healing. Never was her talent more urgently required than when Davie broke both legs in a fall from a roof beam, and Clara served as nurse, therapist, and guilt-tripper-in-chief during his long recovery (“You have always told me that I have the gift of healing. Unless you try to walk, I’ll never believe that again”). Davie walked, and Clara’s future accomplishments became the subject of a plethora of biographies. With her customarily intimate storytelling and fluid, loose-lined pencil and watercolor pictures, Polacco renders a portrait of a child discerning and testing her own strengths. Children will recognize through this pivotal episode that healing is not always a matter of life-saving heroics but the steady application of comfort, exhortation, and lots and lots of patience, a consideration worth pondering for those kids who want to be a doctor or a nurse when they grow up. An author’s note on Barton and her place on the author’s family tree is included. [End Page 329]

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