Shakuru

An adventure depicting the trials and triumphs of a young African-American boy in the mid-19th century, but it’s presented as truthful account of a parallel universe.

Following the stark epigraph—“This book is not fiction”—Elizabeth Collins (all names, including her own, have been changed, she says) divulges in a somber prologue that she’s part of a secret society of “Dreamers” whose past members include Charlemagne, Gandhi and Thomas Jefferson. Sharing and interpreting dreams, revealing alternate worlds, pasts and futures, they’ve chosen to emerge from chosen obscurity to tell Shakuru’s story, among others, in order to “alter the destructive course” of the world and demonstrate the power of dreams. An unnamed boy and his grandfather are then introduced; it’s the story—“a recollection of a place and a time that seems familiar, even though it’s not”—this man tells his grandson that fills the book’s pages. Shakuru begins the story as George Lincoln, 10, an honorable, courageous and shrewd slave in Tennessee. He has a special gift with horses and prevents his family from starving by hunting and fishing. In the same day, with a slingshot he rescues his master’s son from armed marauders and rushes into a burning barn to save the horses that are the estate’s livelihood. Although George, his brother, sister and parents experience a nearly unbelievably superlative, benign form of slavery, the South is portrayed as dangerous and barren, and the residents of the plantation—whites and newly freed blacks—decide to join a wagon train and move west, to California. George and his brother Wilson end up alone on the treacherous wagon journey, and after a brutal attack, they’re taken prisoner by a warrior tribe called the Chokobi. George—now renamed Shakuru—must learn to accept as his own the people who murdered his companions. He does, and grows into a preternaturally skilled, savvy warrior leader, protecting Indian tribes from the U.S. forces seeking to displace them. The story, once it gets rolling, is straightforward, action-packed and emotionally engaging, somewhat excusing the factual-historical fuzziness. Amid only a glancing discussion of serious issues (race, war, etc.), the alternate-reality setup is a bit odd, especially since there’s no further mention of dreams. In this volume—more could be on the way, says Collins—it’s not exactly clear what purpose it serves in an otherwise compelling story.

Lively historical fiction with a strange paranormal twist.