Review of the Day: Will’s Race for Home by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Will’s Race for Home
By Jewell Parker Rhodes
Illustrated by Olga and Aleksey Ivanov
Little, Brown and Company
$17.99
ISBN: 9780316299336
Ages 9-12
On shelves now

Perhaps I was biased towards it from the start. I remember the first moment I saw the cover for Will’s Race for Home. I was tooling about the internet (as one does) when I came across this striking book jacket. On it is a Black boy, looking around 12 years of age, on a big black horse. With the sky burning yellow behind them, boy and horse are thundering forward with similar looks of intense concentration. From the boy’s clothing you can instantly tell that he’s from the past. And the first thing I did upon seeing this jacket was to post it all over the socials saying, “See? Is this so hard, people??” Because do you know how rare this book is? Though things have improved significantly since Walter Dean Myers wrote his New York Times opinion piece “Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?” (and since I counted a whopping six middle grade novels starring Black boys the year before in 2013) we still aren’t really seeing a plethora of such books. Interestingly, Black boys do appear on book covers, but just fantasy novels and works of realistic fiction. Historical fiction is not common and even when it does happen the images are pretty static. General guys-staring-off-into-space kind of stuff. To see an active protagonist in a moment of action looking (let’s be frank) badass in the process… well, let’s just say I’m not surprised that the book has already shown up on the New York Times bestseller list. Of course, that might also be due to the fact that Jewell Parker Rhodes writes this quick, slick, gripping paean to the Western genre while also tying in fantastic historical details and an overarching tale of a boy and his father bonding at last.

Will hates Texas. Seriously, he hates it. He knows that his dad and grandpa walked here after slavery ended so that they could work the land, but sharecropping cotton is awful. Will knows his father feels the same way. Trouble is, he and his father hardly ever talk. The man has seen and lived things that have left him quiet, contemplative, and depressed. That is, before he learns about the Oklahoma Land Rush. It’s 1889 and for the first time, Will’s family has a chance to establish land of their own in Oklahoma. If they’re going to get to the starting line on time, just Will and his father will need to get there on their own. That means dealing with thieves, poisonous snakes, near drowning, and more. It also means pairing alongside a mysterious ex-soldier named Caesar. But when Caesar’s life is in danger and the due date draws near, will Will have the courage to save his father’s dream all by himself?

You know how movies in theaters these days are always over two hours and we all seem to have accepted this fact as normal? Similar is the growth effect that the Harry Potter books had on children’s novels. Once those titles started blowing up in length, books that weren’t even in the fantasy genre followed suit. Great for regular readers. Not great for reluctant ones. If you were a kid easily intimidated by page length, it was a tough era. Verse novels have gone a long way to alleviate some of this anxiety, but there’s something to be said about a sweet, tight, concise narrative where the author knows how to pack the pages with strong character development, descriptions, and a fast-paced plot. That’s what you get with Will’s Race for Home. Clocking in at a sweet 196 pages, the book harkens back to a kind of fiction for kids that was around in the 70s and 80s. Short and to the point. The significant difference, though, (and part of the reason I keep stating that we are living in a Golden Age of Children’s Literature these days) is that Rhodes works in the history of the Black exodusters beautifully into this story. That’s what gives the narrative its heart and soul. The fact that it has some backmatter giving context is just the icing on the cake.

Someone asked me the other day, “Who’s a male author that writes women really well?” After pondering I shot back with, “Well, do you know who’s a female author that writes men really well? Jewell Parker Rhodes!” I was thinking of this book, and for good reason. Want a jolt of positive masculinity to combat the toxic masculinity out there? Here’s where you start. This is full of heartfelt conversations between men. It’s about male friendship and father/son relationships. Needless to say, this book does not pass the Bechdel-Wallace Test, but I’m going to give it a pass since 90% of the Western middle grade fare we read is entirely focused on girls. Think for a minute about all the recent publications about going out west. From One Big Open Sky by Lisa Cline-Ransome to Prairie Lotus by Linda Sue Park, the heroes tend to be girls. In this book the primarily relationship is between Will and his father. Will’s dad has been pretty distant towards him his entire life, and the reasons behind this appear to be complex. As you read you discover that some of this reluctance to bond may have something to do with the fact that Will’s dad was born into slavery while his son was not. As such, his dad sees his son as innocent, soft, and unaware of the ways of the world. It’s only alluded to once, but its shadow stretches long.

One thing I found a mite bit peculiar about the book was the fact that the illustrators weren’t credited on the cover, the back bookflap, or the title page. Indeed, you have to dig pretty deep into the publication page to learn that the art in this book was produced by Olga and Aleksey Ivanov. Now there’s good reason why Little, Brown would have tapped them as a resource. Aside from being two of the top Egg Tempera Fine Artists in the country (or so sayeth their galleries) they specialize in Western scenes. Like Leo and Diane Dillon, they work together on their art. In this book that means drawing key scenes of the book in what appears to be graphite. The selection of which scenes to illustrate is interesting. Some I utterly agree with. Others I would have taken and given to other moments in the book, but all of them hit just the right kid-friendly level of sophistication. And while I might quibble with the look of Caesar (I see him as much taller and thinner – more Kareem Abdul-Jabbar than Shaft) overall they do a great job. However you slice it, though, they do right by Rhodes’ words.

It’s also a bit rare to run into a straight up Western. I mean, a Western Western. High noon shoot outs. Outlaws and cowboys. Also, a reference to the film Shane that’s impossible to ignore. For adults, this is familiar territory. But for kids? All of this is completely new. Now the elephant in the room is something I’ve noticed in more than one exoduster children’s book and I’m still having some difficulty figuring out how I feel about it. Native Americans will often call out the sheer erasure of their people from works of fiction. An egregious version of this happened years ago in 2009 when a fantasy author said in public that she’d created an alternate America without Native peoples (she said the Land Bridge never existed) because it was simpler to write the book without them. This event was called Mammothgate (the idea being that woolly mammoths would still exist if humans hadn’t populated the Americas) and it raised larger questions of whether or not it’s just as much a sin to erase an entire people as it is include them poorly. Because the focus of this book is on the Black American historical experience, I kept a sharp eye out for any mention of why, precisely, all this land in Oklahoma has opened up. Read the novel itself alone and no mention is made of Indigenous peoples. Not once. That struck me as less than realistic, but had Rhodes been realistic then it’s entirely possible that the characters would have been saying historically accurate things that were offensive to modern readers. Still, it’s a little difficult to hear a book talking about owning land when you know the land is stolen land. To some extent I was reminded of Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry. That’s another series where the focus on land is paramount (one of the books in the series actually sporting the name The Land). This book harkens back to that one, and would probably pair beautifully together in some kind of class unit. Now none of this is to say that Rhodes doesn’t mention Indigenous people at length in her Afterword. She name checks the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Chocktaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Cherokee, and Creek tribes. She speaks at length there about the injustices put upon them. The question is, does that make up for not mentioning them in the larger text, even briefly? Something to think about.

Before she became a children’s book author, Jewell Parker Rhodes was a prolific adult author. Indeed, my own library is full of her historical fiction. It makes perfect sense that when she pivoted to children’s historical fiction, the genre would fit her like a glove. But it’s not enough to just know the time period. There’s heart in this book. Men and boys bonding. A consideration of violence and guns that rings louder here than most books set in the present day even get close to. A too little mentioned moment from American history now getting its day in the sun. Short and sweet, exciting and touching. And while I’d like a larger conversation about Indigenous representation in narratives that involve their land, I think that there’s a lot in this book that I’d like other authors to replicate. For those kids that pooh-pooh historical fiction as boring, this is the book you hand them. And if this is the future of children’s literature, I am here for it.

On shelves now.

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