Our daughter's teacher is having their 6th grade class read ‘A Long Walk to Water‘. Our daughter is struggling with severe anxiety, migraines, and nightmares due to the pandemic and challenges with distance learning. We don’t want her to have to read this book due to her fragile emotional state.

If we were not in the midst of the current coronavirus pandemic, we believe this book would most likely be fine for our daughter. It’s just that right now she’s having a very difficult time and she reacts strongly to any material she finds scary, negative, violent, stressful, etc. and this book is, well, here’s what commonsensemedia has to say about ‘A Long Walk to Water’:

Parents need to know A Long Walk to Water by Newbery Medal-winning author Linda Sue Park (A Single Shard) blends fact and fiction to tell a story of the civil war in Sudan (1983–2005), in which more than 20,000 so-called Lost Boys became displaced and/or orphaned. There are bombings, burnings, and people with guns and machetes. Protagonist Salva, who's 11 when his story begins in 1995, knows that sometimes boys are forced to fight. Walking from his village to a refugee camp, he suffers greatly from thirst and hunger. His friend's eaten by a lion, he sees people who have died from dehydration in the desert, and he watches his uncle get shot to death. Another man is hit in the head with the butt of a gun. A boy is shot and another is killed by a crocodile after refugees are forced in the water by soldiers -- 1,000 refugees die that day. Readers will learn through the alternating story of Nya, an 11-year-old Sudanese girl in 2008, about people trying to solve problems in that country after the civil war, some with nonprofits that come to build wells in villages, and they learn how fresh water can lead to schools, markets, and more.