NOBODY’S BOY

Eleven-year-old George is a slave who is coming to hate his condition. He also realizes that his mother and a slave named Chap are finding ways to fight their oppression. Chap is helping slaves escape; George’s mother, Lizzie Keckly, aims to be “an upstanding citizen” and buy her freedom. George, who is fair-skinned enough to pass as white, realizes he can use his color as a weapon against servitude. Chap liked the “irony of George using his white skin against the white slaveholder.” George’s first act is to help a friend escape, acting as the white owner traveling with his slave. Based on the true story of a slave whose owner was involved in the Dred Scott case and whose mother became the dressmaker for Mary Todd Lincoln, this is a good story hobbled by a flat, scholarly tone, with too little dialogue or dramatic tension. Fleischner’s biography of Elizabeth Keckly, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship between a First Lady and a Former Slave (2003), will reward older readers who want to know more. (Fiction. 10+)