Yeny and the Children for Peace

by Michelle Mulder

Overview

What weapon can children use to fight violence? A vote for peace!

Yeny and her family have escaped from the violence in their mountain village in Colombia to live in the city. But danger remains all around her — from groups of armed men who have kidnapped her uncle to a scary bully at school. Yeny feels powerless until her new friends decide to organize a peace carnival. Before long, the peace movement has attracted young people from across the country, and they decide to hold a national vote for peace.

Inspired by the Colombian Children’s Movement for Peace – on October 25, 1996, millions of kids throughout Colombia held a vote that resulted in one full day with no bombs, shootings, or kidnappings. The group has been nominated every year since then for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781926739786
Publisher:	Second Story Press
Publication date:	01/01/2008
Series:	Kids' Power Book Series , #2
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	9 - 13 Years

About the Author

Michelle Mulder is passionate about books, bicycles, children, and chocolate. This is her third book for children. She has lived in Halifax, Montreal, and Vancouver. She and her husband are now living happily in Victoria, B.C.

Editorial Reviews

Gr 4-5

Driven from their village in 1996 by ongoing violence, Yeny and her family move in with cousins in Bogotá where Yeny looks for new friends and her parents worry that her joining the Children's Movement for Peace will endanger her further. Inspired by actual events, this story focuses on those leading up to the day in October when the violence stopped and millions of Colombian children voted for what they considered their most important rights. While Yeny deals with children's issues-friendship and bullying-the conflict between those cowed by violence and those driven to speak out is expressed on an adult level by disagreement between her parents and her aunt. Written for a younger audience than readers of Sara Cameron's Out of War (Scholastic, 2001), this book lacks the immediacy of those personal experiences. The third-person narrative never quite comes alive; although told from Yeny's point of view, it doesn't give much sense of her as a person. In order to explain the culture to North American readers, the author had to contrive many occasions for Yeny to describe details of her life that would normally go unremarked. Black-and-white photographs of the day's event and subsequent peace activities add verisimilitude. This powerful story is still waiting for the right teller.-Kathleen Isaacs, Towson University, MD

School Library Journal

A moving story that will motivate children, highly recommended.

Children's Bookwatch

Highly readable in style, authentic in detail and tough to put down. The fiction-based-on-fact approach, which uses a lively young character to whom preteens will easily relate, is a perfect way to engage interest and initiate discussion.

CM Magazine