A story that will bring Civil War history alive for adolescent readers and will make a useful addition to middle school...
A slave boy travels from a Maryland plantation to freedom in Canada via the Underground Railroad in this debut middle-grade historical novel.
Noonan convincingly re-creates the voice of 12-year-old slave Moses, who works in the tobacco fields at Maryland’s Oakley Plantation. His mother is going to be sold, which he takes as a cue to escape: “If they was gonna rip me away from her like seed outta cotton, then I was gonna be free.” After seeing his mother off at the train station, he slips into the woods and travels to his first Underground Railroad stop, a flour mill owned by Quakers. From there, he crosses Pennsylvania, shuttling mostly between anti-slavery activists and members of the clergy. Along the way, abolitionists and free, educated blacks teach him basic literacy. Moses’ visual description of the letters of his own name—“Mountains. A wheel. And snakes with Jacob’s ladder right in between”—provides a good example of his literal, folksy vocabulary. His homespun metaphors are as charming as they are everyday (“My eyes musta growed big as those biscuits I had for breakfast”; “A woman’s voice drifted through the air like butter on grits”). During a stay with a reverend, Moses meets Tillie, a runaway slave–turned-maid. When the Fugitive Slave Act passes, Moses and Tillie decide to continue on to Canada. On their fraught journey, they fend off wolves, hire a part-Iroquois guide, and hide in an outhouse and church bell tower. The writer and statesman Frederick Douglass makes a delightful cameo appearance when the couple meet at his print shop; he encourages Moses to continue writing his own narrative about escaping slavery. Moses and Tillie frequently encounter minor characters, and these helpers are all so distinctive that they never blend together. The escape storyline, by its very nature, has some built-in repetition, but the author’s careful insertion of historical research about slavery laws and escape routes, and the suspense of slave-catchers being hot on the young people’s trail, keeps the narrative rollicking along. Despite a melodramatic climax, younger teenage readers should find inspiration as well as information here.
A story that will bring Civil War history alive for adolescent readers and will make a useful addition to middle school curricula.Pub Date: June 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62208-534-7
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Helping Hands Press
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Broccoli: No way is James going to eat broccoli. “It’s disgusting,” says James. Well then, James, says his father, let’s consider the alternatives: some wormy dirt, perhaps, some stinky socks, some pre-chewed gum? James reconsiders the broccoli, but—milk? “Blech,” says James. Right, says his father, who needs strong bones? You’ll be great at hide-and-seek, though not so great at baseball and kickball and even tickling the dog’s belly. James takes a mouthful. So it goes through lumpy oatmeal, mushroom lasagna and slimy eggs, with James’ father parrying his son’s every picky thrust. And it is fun, because the father’s retorts are so outlandish: the lasagna-making troll in the basement who will be sent back to the rat circus, there to endure the rodent’s vicious bites; the uneaten oatmeal that will grow and grow and probably devour the dog that the boy won’t be able to tickle any longer since his bones are so rubbery. Schneider’s watercolors catch the mood of gentle ribbing, the looks of bewilderment and surrender and the deadpanned malarkey. It all makes James’ father’s last urging—“I was just going to say that you might like them if you tried them”—wholly fresh and unexpected advice. (Early reader. 5-9)
Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-14956-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The seemingly ageless Seeger brings back his renowned giant for another go in a tuneful tale that, like the art, is a bit sketchy, but chockful of worthy messages. Faced with yearly floods and droughts since they’ve cut down all their trees, the townsfolk decide to build a dam—but the project is stymied by a boulder that is too huge to move. Call on Abiyoyo, suggests the granddaughter of the man with the magic wand, then just “Zoop Zoop” him away again. But the rock that Abiyoyo obligingly flings aside smashes the wand. How to avoid Abiyoyo’s destruction now? Sing the monster to sleep, then make it a peaceful, tree-planting member of the community, of course. Seeger sums it up in a postscript: “every community must learn to manage its giants.” Hays, who illustrated the original (1986), creates colorful, if unfinished-looking, scenes featuring a notably multicultural human cast and a towering Cubist fantasy of a giant. The song, based on a Xhosa lullaby, still has that hard-to-resist sing-along potential, and the themes of waging peace, collective action, and the benefits of sound ecological practices are presented in ways that children will both appreciate and enjoy. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-689-83271-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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