BookBright
ABOUT THE BOOK
NO SPOILERSAn old man living near Seattle, a former history teacher with an artificial arm who secretly prefers to be called X, admits what he never told his students: during World War II, he was a German soldier. On March 21, 1944, his sixteenth birthday, Erik Brandt rides a troop train east from Nuremberg with other barely trained teenage recruits, all wearing the mended uniforms of dead men. Erik's mother and grandparents are Russians living in Germany on forged papers, and he speaks Russian as easily as German. Under a badly scarred sergeant named Dobelmann, he and his new friends are sent to the trenches facing the Russian army. When a tank attack overruns their lines, Erik wakes up surrounded by Russians and makes a desperate choice, trading clothes with a dead Russian boy. Soon he is a patient in a Russian army hospital in the village of Alreni, among wounded men and young nurses, where he must pretend to be Russian, and pretend he has lost his memory, to stay alive.
Free Battle of the Books questions for Soldier X
SPOILERSEvery one of these has the same answer, and that is the point. In a real battle the question is read aloud with a dozen other books in play, and students have a few seconds to place it. Here is what a battle might ask about Soldier X. Use them as a quiz, a trivia round, or BOTB practice.
Where in the book they come from
- Early in the book
In what book does a duck paddle in the flooded back seat of a sideways convertible?
✓ Answer
Soldier X by Don Wulffson
As the convoy rolls east past ruined towns and wrecked vehicles, the oddest wreck Erik sees is a Mercedes-Benz convertible lying sort of sideways in a pool made by a bomb crater. Its back seat is full of brown water, and a quacking duck is paddling around in it.
- First half
In what book do four burned men wrapped like mummies drink a stranger's canteen dry?
✓ Answer
Soldier X by Don Wulffson
Taken from the battlefield as a wounded Russian, Erik is put on a horse-drawn cart with four look-alike burn patients whose heads, chests and arms are wrapped in gauze. One of them asks about the canteen on Erik's belt, and Erik tells them to take all they would like.
- First half
In what book does a man in a body cast look like he is wearing "cement pants"?
✓ Answer
Soldier X by Don Wulffson
When Erik wakes in a village schoolroom turned into a hospital, the cheerful patient in the next bed is Nikolai Mikhailovich, in a cast from the waist down. Nikolai welcomes him back to the world and soon becomes like the father Erik never knew.
- Second half
In what book does a radio and record player as big as a refrigerator fill a hospital with Tchaikovsky?
✓ Answer
Soldier X by Don Wulffson
Rubin gets the giant old machine working, it is hauled to the school-hospital in an ambulance, and Vlad and Oleg mount speakers in all the wards. When the classical music plays, patients and staff smile and cry, and Erik remembers it as the happiest he ever saw the people there.
- Second half
In what book does a lizard-like old farmer with a sway-backed horse pull a revolver?
✓ Answer
Soldier X by Don Wulffson
Lost after three days in the forest, Erik walks out alone to talk to a farmer plowing with a sway-backed horse, and the frightened old man fumbles a revolver from his waistband. Erik thinks he looks like a reptile, with scaly wrinkles and bulging eyes that seem to move separately, and learns from him that they are in the Ukraine near the Czechoslovakian border.
- Near the end
In what book do two runaways spend a rainy night huddled in the tail of a wrecked American bomber?
✓ Answer
Soldier X by Don Wulffson
Avoiding a village where fighting has broken out, Erik and Tamara cross a field scattered with the wreckage of an American bomber and crawl into its tail, the only part still in one piece. Rain pings on the metal and blows in through the jagged opening, and they spend a cold, miserable night hugging each other for warmth.
