Spoiler-free summary: A fictionalized biography of Harriet Tubman. She was a a slave in Maryland who escaped north, then helped others escape. She also became active for the Union Army during the Civil War. A great example of a novel that did not age well.
Discussion: I don’t read much middle-grade nonfiction, but I can’t imagine a fictionalized biography of someone like Harriet Tubman would fly today. It’s not clear which parts were made up, which undermines the power of the stuff she actually did do. At that point, why are you even writing about Harriet Tubman?
Well, okay – apparently Tubman wasn’t as well known at the time, and there wasn’t anything aimed towards younger readers about her. The line seems to be that making a better story would make people more interested in digging into the true stuff. The problem is that the story isn’t very good, either. It has a weird pacing to it – it does try to hit highlights of her life, so it’ll jump years at a time after her escape from slavery, all without building on clear narrative arcs or themes or anything like that. What it does seem to land on as the major storyline that runs through her life is her relationship with “Marse George,” her (fictional) abusive old owner. She kills a Confederate spy who happens to be him late in the book (her reaction to this is baffling), and the closing pages are her return to her old plantation to tell Miss Annie about his death. It just doesn’t work.
And of course, there are the other things that don’t age well in a book about slavery from this era. All the black people’s dialogue is written in thick dialect. Did Harriet Tubman actually sound like a character in a minstrel show? Who knows. And for all the reviews of this book that talk about how it illustrates how terrible slavery is, it actually felt to me like it romanticized it. It definitely was forgiving of a lot of slaveowners, and painted the harsh plantation owners like Marse George as the exceptions. I was a bit surprised to find out that this preceded Gone with the Wind, since the end scene felt a lot like the post-war scenes when they get back to a hollowed-out Tara.
I can’t recommend this book to anyone except Newbery completists and those with a specific interest in literature on the subject. I would actively advise young readers to avoid it.
Next on the list is The Golden Basket by Ludwig Bemelmans. This is the guy who did the Madeline books, it’ll be interesting to see what this is like.
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