Mary Mehan Awake

Becoming Mary Mehan #2

by Jennifer Armstrong

The close of the Civil War finds Mary Mehan as emotionally traumatized as the demobilized soldiers around her, and she must begin a journey of emotional and physical renewal. This moving sequel to one of the most highly praised young adult books of 1996, The Dreams of Mairhe Mehan, is now in Knopf Paperback.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction

128 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Jennifer Armstrong learned to read and write in Switzerland, in a small school for English speaking children on the shores of Lake Zurich. The school library had no librarian and no catalog – just shelves of interesting books. She selected books on her own, read what she could, and made up the rest. It was perfect. As a result, she made her career choice – to become an author – in first grade. When she and her family returned to the U.S. she discovered that not all children wrote stories and read books, and that not all teachers thought reading real books was important. Nevertheless, she was undaunted. Within a year of leaving college she was a free-lance ghost writer for a popular juvenile book series, and before long published her first trade novel, Steal Away, which won her a Golden Kite Honor for fiction.

More than fifty additional novels and picture books followed, and before long she also tried her hand at nonfiction, winning an Orbis Pictus Award and a Horn Book Honor for her first nonfiction book, Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World. In late 2003 she will travel to the South Pole with the National Science Foundation to do research for a book on ice.

Reviews

[James Crawford · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is the sequel to The Dreams of Mairhe Mehan and is about a young Irish girl whose brother was killed in the Civil War and whose father basically became temporarily insane then ended up returning to Ireland, leaving her along.

Mary worked for a long time in the hospitals treating soldiers injured in the Civil War and she saw so much suffering that she eventually pretty much shut down emotionally. She is recommended to a naturalist as a girl that could help around the house and she's hired as a servant, doing just about any jobs. The owner of the house, though, is very mild-mannered as is his wife and Mary finds her new job not to be any major kind of hardship.

There is a young boy there, Henry, who served in the Civil War in the artillery and as a result lost his hearing. The book deals with Mary's gradually coming alive again, being able to feel and sense things and actually have feelings towards someone else; namely, Henry.

It's an interesting book and a good story about how someone can triumph over great emotional pain.

[Catherine Mustread · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grades 6+. Sequel to Dreams of Mairhe Mehan. While working in the home of a naturalist, Mairhe gradually recovers from the numbing effects of her experience as a Civil War nurse and falls in love with a man who had lost his hearing.