"The Trumpeter of Krakow" -Eric P. Kelly

Way back when...I got a list of all the Newbery and Caldecott winners and decided to read my way through them. (Must've been 2003 when The Man Who Walked Between the Towers by Mordicai Gerstein came out; my favorite Caldecott book!) I've done pretty well, picture books go much faster, of course, but novels aren't exactly textbook dry. Somehow The Trumpeter of Krakow didn't look appealing until I came across it this summer (Guilty: I always judge books by their covers) while helping Tarzan do inventory at work.

And it was good. The tale the book builds upon is very moving: a trumpeter sounds a trumpet each hour in each of the 4 compass directions from the tower of a church in Krakow, Poland. When the city is attacked by Tartars, the trumpeter sounds the trumpet but is killed mid-hymn. In memoriam, the hymn is cut short purposefully. From this, the book is about a boy who sounds the trumpet but continues the song as a warning of danger, rather than ending it. The book was lauded for its introduction of Polish history to young readers and for the author's sensitivity to detail and culture.

Read Also:

If you'd care for a history of the time period, Harold Lamb's The March of Muscovy (and indeed, Harold Lamb in general) is a good account of Ivan the Terrible's Russia.

Margaretha Shemin's The Little Riders

And any Newbery book is recommendation on its own.