In the autumn of 1860, Levi Anderson is thirteen years old, invisible in his own family, and happiest alone by the creek with a borrowed book. When the war comes, it takes his brothers first. What it leaves behind is worse than what it takes.

Beaten by the brother who stays, rescued by the sister who acts, Levi enlists in the 6th Indiana Infantry at fourteen, lying about his age to escape the only home he has ever known. He fights at Shiloh, Stones River, and Chickamauga, where a bullet tears open his face and Confederate soldiers take him prisoner.

What follows is Andersonville.

Thirty-three thousand men. A stockade. A creek turned to poison. A wooden rail called the dead line, beyond which the guards will shoot without warning. And a friendship with a man named Jim Dearborn that becomes the only thing worth holding on to — and the hardest thing to lose.

The Line Uncrossed is a novel about what a boy sees when everything is taken from him, and what he carries home when the war gives him back. Inspired by the true experience of a fourteen-year-old Indiana soldier who survived the worst place on earth and spent the next forty years teaching other people's children how to read.

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