This new historical fiction novel by Newbery Award-winning writer Christopher Paul Curtis started out to be another story about the lives of the fugitives who settled in Buxton, Canada, a haven for people who had escaped slavery in the southern United States just before the Civil War. As Mr. Curtis tells it, the genesis of the story was a newspaper cutting about the attempted kidnapping of a young African American boy from his home in Canada. The book was supposed to be about this boy and about a poor white boy named Charlie Bobo. Curtis writes: “I’d hoped to explore how much each was a product of his own environment and times, as well as try and analyze what goes into making a human being do something courageous.”

“But once I started pinning Little Charlie to the page, once I got to know his voice and personality, I knew this was his book. Sylvanus was going to have to wait.”

First of all, the negatives about this middle grade fiction book:

~The book is written in Little Charlie’s voice, and Charlie speaks Southern cracker: “Cap’n” instead of Captain, “com-fitting” instead of comfort, “scairt” instead of scared. The dialect helps give Charlie a personality and a distinctive point of view, but it could be distracting and difficult for younger readers. It was a bit distracting for me, until I got used to it.

~There is some mild cursing (he– and da–, mostly). It’s entirely in character for the people who do so to curse, and in fact there are very few curse words in the book, probably much fewer than would realistically be called for in these characters. However, they are there.

~The slave-catcher, Cap’n Buck, is an evil and violent man. And some of that evil and violence makes it into the book in fairly graphic descriptions of gun violence, mob violence, something called “cat-hauling”, and just general violent capture and mistreatment of people who have escaped from enslavement. It’s not gratuitous, nor is it described as graphically as it could have been, but it’s ugly.

The positives:

~The plot moves along well, and the story kept me absorbed. Although I rather expected everything to turn out well in the end, I wasn’t entirely sure if or how that would happen. The events in the story were believable to me, and Charlie was a

~Mr. Curtis is a good writer, and I did manage to get used to the dialect and the misspelled words used to indicate that dialect (turrible and chirren and rep-a-tation). It all sounded authentic in my head, and eventually it helped me to stay in the story and understand the characters.

~The evolution of Charlie’s character and attitudes was realistic as well as hopeful. Charlie doesn’t become a raging abolitionist, but he does begin to see that black people are people, too, just like him—or at least kind of like him. The book portrays the evils and the violence of the slave economy, but it also shows the “points of light” that eventually shone out to eradicate that evil.

Read this novel along with Curtis’s other Buxton novels, Elijah of Buxton and The Madman of Piney Woods, to get a rounded picture of the lives of ante-bellum African Americans, both enslaved and escaped from slavery. And in this third book about Buxton, get a snapshot of where the prejudiced and hateful attitudes and actions that sustained slavery for so long may have originated and how they were perpetuated.

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This book may be nominated for a Cybils Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.