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risten's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racial slurs, Slavery, and Racism
Moderate: Grief, Death, Injury/Injury detail, Child death, Animal death, Violence, Fire/Fire injury, and Torture
Minor: Alcohol and Vomit
atamano's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Torture, Racism, Slavery, Fire/Fire injury, and Physical abuse
Moderate: Alcohol, Injury/Injury detail, Animal death, and Body shaming
Minor: Death of parent, Vomit, and Gun violence
nairam1173's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
hopeful
medium-paced
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
This isn't a bad book, and perhaps if I hadn't entered it with the weight of Newbery gold on it I wouldn't have spent so much time trying to understand why it was chosen out of the novels of 2023. But, to be honest, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have finished it either.
The characters are diverse with varied motivations and different ways of holding trauma, and dealing with the situation of being enslaved, which I find quite realistic and extremely humanizing. You may not "like" each individual character the same, but they're all given the room to deal with the horrific situation they've found themselves in, and trauma is always an ugly thing, directed inward OR outward. And it is never the fault of the person who is experiencing it.
The setting is both historical and something new and almost magical--I can see the idea of living in a beautiful, protected swamp community with "sky bridges" as something children would really enjoy.
What kept tripping me up about reading it is the way it so strongly *feels* like a first book. There are at least a dozen different POVs, Homer's first person, and then many many close third person of other characters. Sometimes this gives insight into their personal thoughts and feelings (Sanzi feels closest to an additional main character), but often it felt unnecessary and jarring, like the author felt we needed to see EVERYTHING in the plot to understand it.
Then too, a number of these third person POVs melded to sounding about the same, especially because of the "head hopping" that would take place when the author decided they needed insight into a scene companion as well. Which honestly makes all of the different characters getting their own chapter headings more confusing--if you're going to be more omniscient in how you describe scenes, why bother trying to focus us down to one person in the first place?
I also understand that a finale dependent on "the kids save the day, without doing the obvious thing of telling the grownups" is something you're going to run into with this age group, but even besides that, the final conclusion feels almost overwrought in its complexity and "at the same time--"ness of all the character threads. I'm not sure why we heard from Anna, expect to set up a helpful hindrance to the bad guys in the final chapters.
In many ways, I felt like my attention was spread too thin to closely connect to any characters, and that also the characters that were NOT given POVs felt strangely left out. If Stokes gets his couple of chapters to herd around his slave-hunting buffoons, why do we hear nothing from Rose? Why does she become almost a MacGuffin?
Anyway, again, I don't think this is a bad book and it certainly relevant and diverse and getting across a much less known historical story (maroon communities, not just the Underground Railroad, "heading north" storyline), I just found the missteps of craft extremely distracting.
The characters are diverse with varied motivations and different ways of holding trauma, and dealing with the situation of being enslaved, which I find quite realistic and extremely humanizing. You may not "like" each individual character the same, but they're all given the room to deal with the horrific situation they've found themselves in, and trauma is always an ugly thing, directed inward OR outward. And it is never the fault of the person who is experiencing it.
The setting is both historical and something new and almost magical--I can see the idea of living in a beautiful, protected swamp community with "sky bridges" as something children would really enjoy.
What kept tripping me up about reading it is the way it so strongly *feels* like a first book. There are at least a dozen different POVs, Homer's first person, and then many many close third person of other characters. Sometimes this gives insight into their personal thoughts and feelings (Sanzi feels closest to an additional main character), but often it felt unnecessary and jarring, like the author felt we needed to see EVERYTHING in the plot to understand it.
Then too, a number of these third person POVs melded to sounding about the same, especially because of the "head hopping" that would take place when the author decided they needed insight into a scene companion as well. Which honestly makes all of the different characters getting their own chapter headings more confusing--if you're going to be more omniscient in how you describe scenes, why bother trying to focus us down to one person in the first place?
I also understand that a finale dependent on "the kids save the day, without doing the obvious thing of telling the grownups" is something you're going to run into with this age group, but even besides that, the final conclusion feels almost overwrought in its complexity and "at the same time--"ness of all the character threads. I'm not sure why we heard from Anna, expect to set up a helpful hindrance to the bad guys in the final chapters.
In many ways, I felt like my attention was spread too thin to closely connect to any characters, and that also the characters that were NOT given POVs felt strangely left out. If Stokes gets his couple of chapters to herd around his slave-hunting buffoons, why do we hear nothing from Rose? Why does she become almost a MacGuffin?
Anyway, again, I don't think this is a bad book and it certainly relevant and diverse and getting across a much less known historical story (maroon communities, not just the Underground Railroad, "heading north" storyline), I just found the missteps of craft extremely distracting.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Slavery and Racism
Moderate: Injury/Injury detail and Animal death
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