A Long Walk to Water

Two stories, told in alternating chapters: Salva Dut, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, walking through the civil war in 1985; and Nya, a present-day Sudanese girl who walks eight hours every day to fetch water from a pond. The stories converge. Park worked directly with Salva Dut — who approved the account and now runs a nonprofit that has built hundreds of water wells in South Sudan. This is not a book about African suffering for Western children to feel grateful about. It is a book about a specific person who survived something specific and then spent his life solving the problem that nearly killed him. The most rigorous integrity case in the Little Anarchists catalog and the one that most honestly shows children what it means to turn your worst experience into something useful.