Lunch-Box Dream by Tony Abbott

Bobby, who has anger issues and is obsessed, and I mean crazy obsessed, with death, is on a family trip.  He has to head south to drop off his grandmother and is stuck the entire time with his brother, Ricky, who is crazy about the Civil War.  Meanwhile, Jacob is going off to live with a different family for a while, but he's desperate to return home to his older sister.   The book is set in the South in 1959, with the Jim Crow laws everywhere.  Bobby's family is white, and Jacob's family is black.

I absolutely loved the part where Bobby described what it must have been like for the people so long ago to all wait for the train that carried Lincoln's body.  For that image alone, Lunch-Box Dream should belong with some of the classics of literature.

I wasn't expecting much from this book because I had read Firegirl, by the same author, and found that it followed a standard literary formula.  Lunch-Box Dream was much better.  I will have Bobby's imagined image of the people standing at the tracks at night waiting in me forever.