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January 11, 2011 by Betsy Bird

Review of the Day: Eliza’s Freedom Road by Jerdine Nolen

January 11, 2011 by Betsy Bird   9 comments

Eliza’s Freedom Road: An Underground Railroad Diary
By Jerdine Nolen
A Paula Wiseman Book (Simon & Schuster)
$14.99
ISBN: 978-1-4169-5814-7
Ages 7-11
On shelves now

Name me all the films you can that involve slaves escaping via The Underground Railroad. No? Okay then, I’ll make it easy on you. Name me a single film, just one, that involves slaves escaping via The Underground Railroad. No? Crazy, isn’t it? Here we have what must be one of the most heroic and harrowing real life escape stories in the history of our country, and Hollywood can’t be bothered to put a single such tale to celluloid. Now in the world of children’s literature, The Underground Railroad is a common topic to write on. Books about it abound, though interestingly enough there isn’t a single Underground Railroad novel that eclipses all the others. Maybe that’s why folks keep writing them. The latest I’ve seen recently is Eliza’s Freedom Road. It’s penned by the former picture book author Jerdine Nolen and features a very basic, very straightforward story of one girl escaping to freedom in Canada with some help. If you are looking for a good introductory novel that introduces not just the concept of slavery but also the definition of what The Underground Railroad even was, this slim little book may prove your best chance to do so. It covers familiar ground but reaches a slightly younger audience.

Twelve-year-old Eliza is on her own. No mother. No father. Her mother, you see, was recently sold away to another state, so Eliza spends her days with Abby the cook. She has her mother’s stories, sewn into patches on a special quilt, and that comforts her but it’s not enough. Eliza’s greatest fear is that she might get sent away too, a fear that is more than justified due to the nasty looks she gets from her master. Years ago her mistress taught Eliza to read and write and now relies on the girl to read to her from the newspaper and books. When the chance to accompany her mistress to Maryland comes up, Eliza leaps at the chance. Once there, she finds that there come opportunities in a person’s life to escape into the unknown. Eliza is ready to take that chance, and she has a woman by the name of Harriet Tubman to help her out. Backmatter includes an Author’s Note, Notes on the Stories, a Bibliography, and a long and detailed list of useful websites.

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A couple months ago I was working in my children’s room when I got a request to host a small group of Boy Scouts on one of our late nights. The boys were learning about tall tales so I was asked to read some aloud to them. I selected a variety of tall tale picture books, amongst them Thunder Rose by Jerdine Nolen. When I gave a quickie synopsis of the books I’d chosen and asked the boys which one I should read, they unanimously requested Nolen’s book. And read it to them I did, though the book turned out to be surprisingly long. The author had packed in a lot of text and a lot of descriptions. Halfway through I couldn’t help but think that clearly her heart was on writing something longer, like a novel. So I wasn’t surprised to see Eliza’s Freedom Road come out with the selfsame author’s name on the cover not long after. What did surprise me was that she had decided to go with a diary format. This seemed like a bizarre choice. After all, this was an author who in the aforementioned Thunder Rose could whip out sentences like, “It’s giving me a fortunate feeling rumbling deep in the pit of me. I’ll register it here at the bull’s-eye set in the center of my heart, and see what I can do with it one day!” I thought that with a novel she’d be able to put this descriptive habit to its proper full-length use. Instead, she feels almost hampered by the diary format. Her prose comes out in starts and stops. They’re lovely starts and stops, don’t get me wrong, but I have a feeling that when Ms. Nolen is good and ready she could deliver a full chapter of third person descriptions to make your head turn and spin. Journal entries aren’t quite up to that kind of writing.

Though written to look like a diary of the time, Nolen’s book contains a lot of little changes that make it appropriate reading for kids who are just getting into chapter books that don’t have pictures. In spite of its historical conceit, the book doesn’t seek to replicate the look and spellings of the 1850s, for which I was grateful. There were other aspects to it that make me think that this would make an ideal introductory title for kids just getting into historical fiction. For one thing, it offers a straightforward explanation of what The Underground Railroad actually was. When I was a kid, I remember being incredibly confused by this term. My teachers didn’t really clarify, and I feel as if I spent most of third grade assuming, just as Eliza does at first in this story, that it involved a subterranean train of some sort. A book like this one would have been a godsend.

Of course the characters felt real. Eliza herself manages to sound cute in her youth without sounding precious. A line like “Why am I all the time so full up with thoughts and words in my head?” could easily be rendered intolerable if the author pushed their luck. Nolen doesn’t. I watched with some interest the interactions between Eliza and her mistress, because it was here that Nolen had to walk the finest line of all. On the one hand, Eliza should not be emotionally attached to someone who holds her in bondage. By the same token, this is a woman who has taught her to read, and to not have any human feelings towards her might, to the kids reading anyway, strike them as heartless. That said, I realized partway through the novel that part of the lure of escaped slave tale for children is that the books not only should be but HAVE to be about the self. Children are very interested in their own selves, and Eliza’s Freedom Road speaks to that part of them that looks out for number one. That said, you have to also show your character caring and helping other people or else you might end up with an Ayn Rand novel by mistake.

There’s not a lot of conflict that falls in the path of Eliza and what she wants, so her escape is without much in the way of close calls. I assume that this was done so that the book could cover a lot of ground and tell a lot of stories without losing the younger readers. An Underground Railroad book for smaller children is a tricky choice, and it’s interesting that Ms. Nolen chose to go this route with her first novel. Even here, though, you see her love of storytelling shine through whenever Eliza tells a tale. This is a fine and interesting debut that serves a distinct purpose in any library’s collection. That said, I do hope we’ll see more of Ms. Nolen’s work in the future, and that she won’t confine herself to journal entries and diary dabbles. The story will out.

On shelves now.

Source: Final copy sent from publisher for review.

Notes on the Cover: Hm. I’ve a working theory going on here that kids have a real aversion to brown covers. Wanna guarantee that a kid eschews a great book? Wrap it in a jacket akin to a brown paper bag and watch their attention wane. Now the galley for this book featured full art by Shadra Strickland (you may know her best for the art in Zetta Elliott’s Bird) and it was quite nice. Unfortunately, while I understand why that image was reduced to a circle in the center of a faux diary, did it have to be brown? It looks like an entry in the Dear America series, but even the new Dear America books don’t quite look like this anymore. Hopefully if the book goes to paperback they’ll return to the jacket the ARC sported, which shows Eliza’s quilt as part quilt, part rolling green hills where she must travel in order to be free.

I’m very fond of that picture.  Here you can read Ms. Strickland talk about the changes the jacket went through.

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2011 middle grade fiction2011 middle grade historical fiction2011 reviewshistorical fictionJerdine Nolenmiddle grade fictionmiddle grade historical fictionmulticultural middle grade

About Betsy Bird

Betsy Bird is currently the Collection Development Manager of the Evanston Public Library system and a former Materials Specialist for New York Public Library. She has served on Newbery, written for Horn Book, and has done other lovely little things that she'd love to tell you about but that she's sure you'd find more interesting to hear of in person. Her opinions are her own and do not reflect those of EPL, SLJ, or any of the other acronyms you might be able to name. Follow her on Twitter: @fuseeight.

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About Betsy Bird

Betsy Bird is currently the Collection Development Manager of the Evanston Public Library system and a former Materials Specialist for New York Public Library. She has served on Newbery, written for Horn Book, and has done other lovely little things that she'd love to tell you about but that she's sure you'd find more interesting to hear of in person. Her opinions are her own and do not reflect those of EPL, SLJ, or any of the other acronyms you might be able to name. Follow her on Twitter: @fuseeight.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Brenda Kahn says

    January 11, 2011 at 11:47 am

    Thanks for pointing out this amazing book and also for highlighting the detail of the cover! It is wonderful! This one’s going into my personal collection as well as my school’s library.

    brenda

  2. tanita says

    January 11, 2011 at 2:09 pm

    Ooooooooh.
    May I have that cover as a poster, please, cover gods? Thankyouverymuch.

  3. Shadra Strickland says

    January 11, 2011 at 2:36 pm

    Ha! Thanks so much for talking up the original cover and yes, Tanita, you can find the cover as a print in my etsy shop 😉

  4. Alex Baugh says

    January 11, 2011 at 3:25 pm

    This sounds like a very interesting book for young readers and one I am considering getting for a niece.
    The quilt cover is so wonderful I can only ask what was the publisher thingking by not using it.
    Year ago, the Folk Art Museum here in NY had a exhibit of quilts made by women slaves. They were magnificent. The quilts depicted family history, their daily lifes, birth, deaths, everything, even the underground railroad was there sometimes as a symbol showing the way to go, to indicate a safe house and who among them had decided to runaway – all in little pieces of fabric they put together. What creative talents they were.
    That is what this cover reminds me of. Hopefully they will go back to it.

  5. Sharon says

    January 11, 2011 at 4:07 pm

    That ARC cover image is gorgeous. I echo the call for a poster – I’d love one! As for the book, my kids are always needing historical fiction to read, so this is definitely going on my order list.

  6. Melanie Clark says

    January 11, 2011 at 7:13 pm

    The ARC cover is BEAUTIFUL! I hope they use it for the paperback.

    I had the same kind of confusion about the Underground Railroad when I was a kid. Maybe it would have helped if there were some movies about it. So odd that there aren’t any!

  7. Kristin McIlhagga says

    January 12, 2011 at 3:16 am

    I’m hoping our local library has this title now that I’ve read about it here. It makes me wonder if anyone has ever done any sort of complication and/or analysis of exactly how many children’s titles there are about the underground railroad. It could be interesting to compare the different ways that authors choose to present the story. Thanks for the brain food!

  8. Genevieve E. Marsh says

    January 19, 2011 at 2:23 pm

    Read it now to your children so that they will read it to your grandchildren so that it will be read on and on.

  9. Lynette Dial says

    February 19, 2011 at 6:57 pm

    While visiting my daughter in Maryland four years ago, (by “SHEAR” accident) I met Eliza’s author, Jerdine Nolan, while sitting in the chair next to her at the beauty parlor:) In the midst of our conversation I was delighted to find she was the author of “Thunder Rose,”one of my favorite children’s books. Since I am a storyteller too, you can be certain that our conversation became truly animated with each of us relating personal stories and descriptive anecdotes full of warmth and emotion. The chance meeting was so enjoyable and overwhelming that it engrossed everyone there, even Tamy, the shop’s owner and stylist….Yesterday, after finishing work at our little library in North Carolina, I arrived home only to be overwhelmed again by a FedEx package from Tamy containing the novel “Eliza’s Freedom Road,” with this note: “I’m sending you Ms. Jerdine’s new children’s novel so you will read it for discussion upon your return to the shop…….Love Tamy.” Instantly, I began to read it. I could hear Jerdine’s voice and remember her high-cheeked smile throughout different excerpts of the book. It was a satisfying experience, almost as much fun as meeting her. This book is a wonderful addition to any children’s collection. With anticipation, I’m eager to see what Ms. Jerdine will come up with next:)

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