Hearts of Stone

Kathleen Ernst
Dutton Children's Books (2006)
ISBN 9780525476863
Reviewed by Hannah Helm (age 13) for Reader Views (3/06)

In the book “Hearts of Stone” Hannah, a 15-year old, and her brother Jasper, and her twin sisters, Maude and Mary, lost everything besides each other. Their father went off to war and three months after he left, they got a letter saying that he had died. And that left just her and her siblings along with her mother, but not her mother for long. Her mother died from a heart attack because she got scared by the Army because they came in the house and took a lot of things from them. It scared her so she had a heart attack and dies.

So now that just leaves Hannah and her brother and sisters. And Hannah has to be the older one and take care of the younger ones. Sometimes she just cannot do it because her brother would get mad at her and not listen to her. She knows that she cannot take care of them herself. She knows she has got to do something. There are these families that were friends of their parents and they said that they could take them, but they would have to split apart because they did not have enough money to feed all four of them.  She did not want to do that, because the one thing her mother wanted was for them to stay together. So she has to decide what to do.

They have an aunt that lives in Nashville, and Hannah decides to go to Nashville to find her. She thinks it is the only way to keep the family together. Hannah knows that it will be a long and dangerous journey all the way to Nashville. There was this one guy that they meet and they think he is all nice and everything; he was not very nice because he steals their horse. So they have to take only the things they need now and that is food and they cannot take most of that along. Then they meet this guy named Willie and he takes them the rest of the way to Nashville because that is where he was going anyways.

They get there and they ask people if they know their aunt. And then they find someone that knows her. They tell Hannah where she lives and they go there. But they soon find out that she is died. Hannah does not know what to do now.

What will she do???

“Hearts of Stone” is for teenagers and adults, or for really anyone. It is a good book.

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