It is not often that I hear of a “new” book by a classic author, but Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston never was published during her lifetime due to the subject matter: interviews from the 1920s with one of the last enslaved people from Africa. Finally, it was published in 2018. Now, Ibram X. Kendi

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The children’s novel The Great Quest by Charles Boardman Hawes (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1921) has a nice beginning, with an adventurous tone similar to that in Treasure Island. But for the modern reader, that wholesome, adventurous spirit becomes much more sinister about a quarter of the way through the book, with a tone that feels

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The 2023 middle grade novel Freewater by Amina Luqman-Dawson (Little Brown Books for Young Readers, February 2022) offers a hopeful and dream-like success for two children fleeing slavery. Just as they feel hope of escape ebbing away, a mystery man rescues them, leading them to an island community on the edge of the swamp. Homer’s

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Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley (Doubleday, March 1976) is a truly powerful book. It follows the life of one man’s descendants, beginning in the mid-1700s, and following through to the author himself. The most amazing thing is that all of it was based on a family story passed down for

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Iqbal by Francesco D’Adamo (translated by Ann Leonori) is a young adult novel based on the true story of a boy who, as a child slave in Pakistan, changed the outlook for the hopeless children who work at the rug-making factory he has been transferred to. As told from the fictionalized perspective of a young girl

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Passenger on the Pearl by Winifred Conkling (Algonquin Books, January 13, 2015) is a middle-grade nonfiction story about two young girls who sought to escape slavery in 1840s Washington, D.C. Emily Edmonson was only 13 when she joined siblings and others on the small ship The Pearl in hopes to escape North. It was the

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As I’ve scoured the lists of books about revolutionary America for a book to read for my own education, I struggled to find one that covered a variety of people (I love biographies, but I can’t read one about everyone!) and eras (I would love to learn about all eras of the revolution, from the

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Melodrama is defined by Merriam-Webster as a work characterized by extravagant theatricality and by the predominance of plot and physical action over characterization. By creating a world with both excessively good characters and excessively evil characters, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel about the horrors of slavery is certainly melodramatic. Yet, given her intended audience and the

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