LONGWALKER'S JOURNEY

From Harrell (How Thunder and Lightning Came to Be, 1995), a genuine adventure, made compelling by its veracity. When his family is forced by the US government to relocate from their ancestral home in Mississippi to Oklahoma, Minko Ushi and his father, along with Minko’s headstrong and independent pony, Black Spot, travel ahead of the rest of their people to prepare a home. Along the way, they encounter terrible winter storms, bureaucratic bungling, and racism, as well as occasional, unexpected kindness. Then they must build a house, prepare for planting, and help the survivors recover from the disastrous forced march. As a result of his journey, Minko earns the new name Longwalker. Based on stories from the author’s family, this is an exciting survival story. Minko is an appealingly stoic boy, charmingly captured in Meers’s black-and-white drawings. (Fiction. 8-11)