Martha and the Slave Catchers
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Thirteen-year-old Martha Bartlett insists on being a part of the Underground Railroad rescue to bring her brother Jake back home to their abolitionist community in Connecticut. It's 1860 and though African-Americans and mixed-race peoples in the north are supposed to be free, seven-year-old Jake, the orphan of a fugitive slave, is kidnapped by his "owner" and taken south to Maryland. Jake is what we'd now describe as on the autism spectrum, and Martha knows just how reassure him when he's anxious or fearful. Using aliases, disguises, and other subterfuges, Martha artfully dodges Will and Tom, the slave catchers, but struggles to rectify her new reality with her parents' admonition to always tell the truth. She must be brave but not reckless, clever but not dishonest. But being perceived sometimes as white, sometimes as black during the perilous journey has thrown her sense of her own identity into turmoil. Alonso combines fiction and historical fact to weave a suspenseful story of courage, hope and self-discovery in the aftermath of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, while illuminating the bravery of abolitionists who fought against slavery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alonso's suspenseful tale of headstrong Martha Bartlett, daughter of abolitionists in a Connecticut town in the 1850s, explores the Underground Railroad, the lucrative kidnapping of free blacks in northern states to be slaves in the south, and questions of racial and cultural identity. The recently passed Fugitive Slave Law puts Martha's younger brother, Jake, in potential danger: Jake was secretly born to an escaped slave, who died in childbirth in Martha's home four years earlier. Martha's family is raising the light-skinned and troublesome boy (he would today be identified as on the autism spectrum) as their own. In 1854, the family's fears come true when Jake is taken; Martha, who believes it was her fault, becomes fixated on rescuing him. That she is allowed to be part of the rescue mission stretches credulity, as does her naivet and consistent rule breaking. Adult author Alonso keeps her danger-filled plot moving, but the language is often flat and predictable (at a particularly perilous moment readers learn that "Martha's experience with rivers was not great"). Zunon's stark b&w drawings appear throughout. Ages 8 12. Illustrator's)
