A Long Walk to Water
Linda Sue Park (2010)
“A true story of survival across two timelines: a boy walks 1,500 miles across a war-torn continent so that, decades later, a girl will not have to.”
Why This Book Matters
A Long Walk to Water has sold over four million copies and is one of the most widely assigned middle school texts in the United States. It introduced millions of young readers to the Lost Boys of Sudan and to global water inequality. The novel functions simultaneously as literature and as advocacy — Park and Salva Dut have used its platform to raise funds for Water for South Sudan's drilling projects. It is a rare case of a middle grade novel that has had quantifiable real-world impact.
Firsts & Innovations
One of the first young adult novels to use the dual-timeline structure to connect historical events to contemporary crises in the same geography
Among the earliest widely-assigned texts to center an African child's perspective in an American classroom without a Western mediating character
Pioneered the author-survivor collaboration model in middle grade nonfiction-adjacent fiction
Cultural Impact
The novel has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Water for South Sudan through fundraising drives tied to classroom reading
Regularly used as an anchor text for social studies units on the Sudan conflict and global water access
Introduced the phrase 'one step at a time' as a survival strategy to millions of readers who encountered it first through Uncle Jeong's advice
Sparked classroom campaigns in which students raise money to fund individual wells — making the book's advocacy function literal
Salva Dut has visited hundreds of schools where the novel is taught, closing the loop between the text and the person it depicts
Banned & Challenged
Occasionally challenged for depictions of violence (the war scenes, Jeong's murder, the Nile crossing deaths) and for content some parents consider too emotionally intense for the assigned grade level. These challenges have not succeeded in removing the book from most curricula.