This entry in MacCall and Nichols’ Hidden Histories series takes a fictional look at the Dred Scott decision.
Eliza Scott lives like she’s free, but her liberty is tenuous, at best. She is the 11-year-old daughter of Dred Scott, the litigant in the eponymous 1857 U.S. Supreme Court case regarding African-Americans’ liberties. She and her family live in a nether life between independence and slavery, and she, like quite a few hardheaded preteens, wants to live as though freedom is an assumption, not a wish. However, the realities the Scotts experience curtail Eliza’s sense of entitlement. They must live in a St. Louis jail while awaiting the outcome of the trial and avoid slave catchers who, as her mother reminds Eliza, could kidnap her and sell her—and then there’s the cholera outbreak that kills regardless of race or gender. As she struggles with this contradiction, she manages to make decisions that jeopardize her, her family, and her community. The narrow-escape scenarios MacColl and Nichols create shouldn’t lead readers to cheer Eliza’s pluck so much as to shake their heads at her foolhardiness—and in the antebellum United States, such foolhardiness would have led to sexual violence, if not death. While most middle-grade readers may not know this, presenting it as otherwise, even in a fictional frame, does both them and history a disservice.
It’s understandable to want to create spunky historical heroines, but some children in the past weren’t free to be headstrong—their survival depended on caution. To write fiction otherwise becomes gross revisionism. (author’s note, sources, further reading) (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62091-624-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Calkins Creek/Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
Categories: CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author of the Anastasia books as well as more serious fiction (Rabble Starkey, 1987) offers her first historical fiction—a story about the escape of the Jews from Denmark in 1943.
Five years younger than Lisa in Carol Matas' Lisa's War (1989), Annemarie Johansen has, at 10, known three years of Nazi occupation. Though ever cautious and fearful of the ubiquitous soldiers, she is largely unaware of the extent of the danger around her; the Resistance kept even its participants safer by telling them as little as possible, and Annemarie has never been told that her older sister Lise died in its service. When the Germans plan to round up the Jews, the Johansens take in Annemarie's friend, Ellen Rosen, and pretend she is their daughter; later, they travel to Uncle Hendrik's house on the coast, where the Rosens and other Jews are transported by fishing boat to Sweden. Apart from Lise's offstage death, there is little violence here; like Annemarie, the reader is protected from the full implications of events—but will be caught up in the suspense and menace of several encounters with soldiers and in Annemarie's courageous run as courier on the night of the escape. The book concludes with the Jews' return, after the war, to homes well kept for them by their neighbors.
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit of riding alone in Copenhagen, but for their Jews. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: April 1, 1989
ISBN: 0547577095
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION
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Remarkable.
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A “half-Chinese and half-white” girl finds her place in a Little House–inspired fictional settler town.
After the death of her Chinese mother, Hanna, an aspiring dressmaker, and her White father seek a fresh start in Dakota Territory. It’s 1880, and they endure challenges similar to those faced by the Ingallses and so many others: dreary travel through unfamiliar lands, the struggle to protect food stores from nature, and the risky uncertainty of establishing a livelihood in a new place. Fans of the Little House books will find many of the small satisfactions of Laura’s stories—the mouthwatering descriptions of victuals, the attention to smart building construction, the glorious details of pleats and poplins—here in abundance. Park brings new depth to these well-trodden tales, though, as she renders visible both the xenophobia of the town’s White residents, which ranges in expression from microaggressions to full-out assault, and Hanna’s fight to overcome it with empathy and dignity. Hanna’s encounters with women of the nearby Ihanktonwan community are a treat; they hint at the whole world beyond a White settler perspective, a world all children deserve to learn about. A deeply personal author’s note about the story’s inspiration may leave readers wishing for additional resources for further study and more clarity about her use of Lakota/Dakota. While the cover art unfortunately evokes none of the richness of the text and instead insinuates insidious stereotypes, readers who sink into the pages behind it will be rewarded.
Remarkable. (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-328-78150-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION
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