A review by tashadandelion
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

adventurous funny hopeful reflective medium-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Having read Deacon King Kong this year and loved it, I was eager to try this one out too, and it did not disappoint. McBride has a knack for the ridiculous-and-yet-lovable old man character. John Brown, the iconoclastic abolitionist, and Deacon Sportcoat are about as different from each other as two old men can get, but they're both crazy like foxes. They have something to teach the younger generations when you strip away all the bluster and swagger and disorientation and see their inner truths shining clearly at their cores. The story told in The Good Lord Bird is a fictional imagining of the events leading up to John Brown's doomed raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harper's Ferry, VA (now West Virginia). We see the action through the eyes of a young, enslaved Black boy named Henry who in early pages is swept up in Brown's wake after his father dies suddenly. He's mis-gendered as a girl named Henrietta, and is nicknamed "the Onion". He goes along with this absurd turn of events because it helps him survive the buffeting whims of the dangerous world around him. If you can take the irreverent and nuanced portrayal of power dynamics between whites and Blacks (and among Blacks) in the pre-Civil War US, this rollicking tale will entertain you, start to finish. 
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