A review by alex_watkins
The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson

5.0

I was totally surprised by this book, having seen it about a million times at the library, and seeing it never get picked up no matter how much I put it on display, I didn't have that much interest in it. But it has a power that I completely didn't expect. It riled many emotion for me especially anger, and the book left me very angry at people in the past for being so fricken racist. Yay for the present. The book is written from the point of view mostly of an extremely erudite slave, and so the vocab was especially high-level. In fact this book is written at a higher level than many adult books, so even though I included it in the YA category and so does the library, only the most sat prepared teens should read this without a dictionary/laptop trained to dictionary.com. This book contains one of the most loathsome characters in literature by the end I hated him so much that I was hoping for the most terrible and awful comeuppance but spoiler alert it was not to be. I also found the historical part to be quite interesting, and I suggest reading the bit after the end about some of the history, because for example some things in the book are historically accurate rumors but not actual fact. I'm not sure how I feel about the author's use of blacking out much text, I feel it might have been a cop out instead of actually writing about the characters bad emotional state, maybe some blacking out so that it would not consume a large part of the book, but a little more investigation then was present. In terms of historical fiction about the revolutionary war this is like one million times better than johnny tremaine (is that even about the revolutionary war? I'm not sure because it was so boring)