Review by Booklist Review
Gr. 5-9. In the midst of the Depression, a black family struggles to keep their land and cope with racial prejudices in their Mississippi neighborhood. Other books based on the author's family include Song in the Trees, Let the Circle Be Unbroken, The Gold Cadillac, and The Friendship.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Horn Book Review
Read by Lynne Thigpen. (Intermediate, Middle School)No bells or whistles are required in a reading of Taylor's classic Newbery Medal-winning novel about the Logan family, proud African Americans struggling to hold onto their land and independence in Jim Crow 1930s Mississippi; and Thigpen (of Carmen Sandiego fame) wisely provides none. Her voice is modulated, and her interpretations of the characters are subtle and nontheatrical. Yes, patriarch David Logan's voice is deeper and richer, and more deliberative, than impulsive young narrator Cassie's, and Little Man's determination stands in sharp contrast to white neighbor Jeremy Sim's wistfulness, but in general Thigpen lets the strength of the story speak for itself. An appended author's note, read by Mildred Taylor, tells how her father's own experiences shaped this and subsequent Logan family novels.From HORN BOOK, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
At first Cassie Logan and her brothers, a year or so older than they were in the much briefer, gong of the Trees, (1975) are only dimly aware of rumors that two men have been killed and one badly burned by a white mob. Then Mary, their mother, tries to organize a boycott against the Wallaces, the local storeowners and instigators of the violence, and Logan land and lives are put on the line. Cassie's own spirit is demonstrated straight off, on the first day of the school year, when she refuses to accept a schoolbook labeled ""condition--very poor, race of student--nigra."" Like her parents, Cassie learns that she must pick her shots carefully to survive, and she takes pains to learn a few blackmail-level secrets from her special tormentor, Miz Lillian Jean, before giving the older girl a good thrashing. Tragically though, brother Stacey's friend T.J. who isn't so careful, starts hanging around with the Wallace boys and winds up facing a lynch mob after they talk him into helping them rob a store. Although the Logans, whose ownership of desirable farmland has made them a target of white persecution, live in a virtual state of siege, and even after Papa sets fire to his own cotton to divert the attention of the mob from T.J., the story ends unmelodramatically not far from where it began--after a string of hard-fought victories and as many bitter defeats and with the money for the next tax payment on the land still not in sight. Taylor trusts to her material and doesn't try to inflate Cassie's role in these events, and though the strong, clear-headed Logan family is no doubt an idealization, their characters are drawn with quiet affection and their actions tempered with a keen sense of human fallibility. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
