Two roads

Review by New York Times Review

IN THE PAST FEW YEARS, children's literature has become more committed to diversity, and lately we're seeing more "Own Voices" books, whose authors share their protagonists' marginalized identity. The best of this season's historical fiction demonstrates why all kinds of diversity are important, with writers from varied backgrounds using settings we've seen before - a Native American boarding school, a World War II internment camp in Texas, Okinawa, Chicago during the Great Migration - to tell stories that are nuanced, honest and new. THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT created Indian boarding schools in the late 19 th century to control Native Americans and eradicate their culture. Run on military lines with draconian rules and brutal punishments, they're a stain on our national history - yet some Native American parents, given the complexity of their circumstances, willingly and with full understanding chose to place their own children there. That situation is sensitively dramatized in TWO ROADS (Dial, 320 pp., $16.99; ages io to 14), by the celebrated Abenaki author Joseph Bruchac. In 1932 12-year-old Cal Black and his father live as knights of the road, hobos following an ethical code. Cal's father served honorably in the Great War, but lost the family farm to foreclosure two years ago, just after Cal's mother died. Since then they've ridden the rails in search of better prospects they never find. Cal is often hungry and sometimes scared: Their black hair and tan skin can make him and his father targets in the rural South. But Cal adores his father and is proud of the way they help each other. Then war veterans decide to camp around Washington in pursuit of their wartime bonuses. Cal's father, fearing the situation won't be safe for Cal, drops two bombshells: First, he and Cal are not white. They're Creek Indians. Second, he wants Cal to go to Challagi, the Indian boarding school in Oklahoma that he himself ran away from three times. While the education and the living conditions will be subpar, they're better than what Cal's getting now - and if his father can get his bonus they could go back to having a permanent home. At Challagi, the days of draconian punishments are past, but still far more students run away than graduate. It's not an easy place - but it gives Cal a community, and a tribal identity he didn't realize he was lacking. He joins a band of boys, begins to learn to speak Creek and takes part in stomp dances at night in the woods. Cal's cleareyed first-person narration drives the novel. Meticulously honest, generous, autonomous and true, he sees things for what they are rather than what he'd like them to be. The result is one of Bruchac's best books. Cal comes to see himself as a gentleman of two roads: one he travels with his father, and the other, a Creek road, that he negotiates himself. A detailed afterword explains sources for the story. THE WAR OUTSIDE (Little, Brown, 318 pp., $17.99; ages 12 and up), by Monica Hesse ("The Girl in the Blue Coat"), also takes a setting we think we understand and shifts it in an important way. Seventeen-year-old Haruko is a nisei, an American-born child of Japanese immigrants. In 1944, along with her younger sister and her mother, she travels from Denver to Texas, to join her father in a World War II family internment camp called Crystal City. Unlike the camps where West Coast Japanese-Americans were imprisoned en masse, Crystal City houses enemy aliens suspected of actually spying - and not just Japanese. Germans live in Crystal City, too. On her first day of high school in the camp, Haruko meets Margot, a first-generation GermanAmerican teenager whose family farmed in Iowa. Margot's father attended a Nazi meeting there. Margot hates Hitler but she's not sure what her increasingly unstable father actually believes. Meanwhile Haruko doesn't know why her father was sent to the camp, but she knows he's hiding something from her. Her brother, Ken, is fighting in the United States Army. Has her father somehow endangered him? Crystal City is divided, literally and metaphorically - Japanese on one side of the camp, Germans on the other. Neither side trusts the other; neither side is entirely trustworthy. Because the government considers the families to be prisoners of war, who might be repatriated to their birth countries and complain about their treatment, the facility is reasonably comfortable, with a well-appointed school and a vast community swimming pool. But it's still a prison, and both girls feel changed by their confinement. Haruko and Margot quickly forge an intense, wholly believable, somewhat erotic secret relationship. As the war careens to an end, tensions in the camp lead to violence. One of the girls is forced to betray the other. It's a tightly plotted exploration of the consequences of fear. ALAN GRATZ, the author of the best-selling "Refugee," couldn't write a slow-paced book even if he were paid by the word. In GRENADE (Scholastic, 270 pp., $17.99; ages 9 to 12 ), he takes on the nearly three-month battle of Okinawa through the eyes of two combatants: Ray, a young man on his first tour of duty in the Marines, and Hideki, a 14-year-old schoolboy who is granted early graduation the day the Americans land. He also receives two grenades: one to kill the enemy and one to kill himself. Okinawa had been under Japanese control for over 300 years, but Okinawans never really assimilated, retaining their own language and culture. The higher-ups within the Japanese Army have all removed to the mainland. Those soldiers left on Okinawa are charged with fighting to the last man. Hideki's family lives under the shadow of an ancestor's cowardice, so he's determined to prove himself a hero, until his dying father charges him with finding his sister and staying alive. For a middle school novel this has a high body count. War is relentless; characters we care about die. Gratz is careful not to describe the bloodshed in too much detail, but it still might be a bit much for some readers. The central truth, hard won and believable, is that sometimes it takes greater courage not to fight. Hideki learns to see valor on both sides, to understand that war turns people into monsters, but that after the battle the monsters can become people again. FINDING LANGSTON (Holiday House, 112 pp., $17.99; ages 9 to 13), the first middle grade novel by the picture book writer Lesa Cline-Ransome ("Before She Was Harriet"), takes us into the years just after World War II. When 11-year-old Langston's mother died, his father sold what little they had and moved himself and Langston from Alabama to a black neighborhood in Chicago called Bronzeville. Langston is lonely and grieving. So far none of Chicago's supposed benefits have materialized: His father works long hours but can't afford to replace Langston's worn boots or country overalls. Their apartment is bleak and empty. They seem to have buried all warmth and comfort with Mama. Then, by accident, Langston happens upon the George Cleveland Hall Library. In Alabama, libraries were for whites only. This library, Langston learns, is for any resident of Chicago - and its founder, namesake and head librarian are all black. Langston discovers black writers - among them, a poet with whom he shares a name. Is that an accident? Or did Mama somehow know this poetry? There aren't any explosions in this spare story. Nor is there a happy ending. Instead, Langston discovers something more enduring: solace. To quote Langston Hughes: "My black one / Thou are not beautiful / Yet thou hast / A loveliness / Surpassing beauty." It's a fine epitaph for all of these fine books. KIMBERLY BRUBAKER BRADLEY IS the author of the Newbery Honor-winning "The War That Saved My Life" and its sequel, "The War I Finally Won."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 11, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

Multiple compelling Depression-era histories converge in Bruchac's latest, about a boy attending a government boarding school for Native Americans in 1932. Cal enjoys being a hobo with Pop, riding the rails and doing honest work. But then Pop gives Cal two pieces of life-changing news. The first is that Pop, who Cal always thought was white, is a Creek Indian. Second, Pop is going to D.C. to protest with other WWI veterans for their bonus payments. While Pop is gone, Cal will attend the Challagi Indian Boarding School, where Pop went as a boy. Challagi is a bleak and often brutal place, but, while there, Cal befriends other Native boys from various tribes for the first time. Pop's recollections of the abuses he witnessed at Challagi are so harsh that readers might initially wonder why he sends his son there a question Bruchac also thoughtfully addresses in the afterword. But the students' utter subversion of Challagi's mission to sever their ties with Indian culture soon becomes apparent, as does Cal's powerful, growing understanding of his identity.--Mariko Turk Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Horn Book Review

Abenaki author and storyteller Bruchac (Code Talkers; Talking Leaves, rev. 7/16) crafts an emotional and informative work of historical fiction about family and identity. Set in 1932, the novel finds young Cal Black, who is half Creek but has believed he was white his entire life, and his father riding the railroad lines of Depression-era America as hoboes in search of work. Cal, who experiences unexplained premonitions, enjoys their nomadic life, but when his father, a WWI veteran, feels compelled to join the Bonus Army march in Washington, DC, he tells Cal about their true heritage and enrolls him in an Indian boarding school in Oklahomathe same one he attended as a young man. Cal is forced to confront this heretofore-unknown part of his heritage while adjusting to life at a school designed to kill the Indian within him, even if he doesnt know exactly what it means to be Creek in the first place. The first-person narrative rings true, and Cals visions work both to heighten the tension and to propel the story forward. The fictional Challagi School Cal attends stands in for the actual Indian boarding schools of the era and gives readers a look into the day-to-day life of a student at one of these institutions. The afterword provides readers more information on the history of federal Indian boarding schools, as well as further background on the Great Depression. A tautly paced and compelling story of self-discovery, family, belonging, and friendship. eric carpenter (c) Copyright 2018. 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.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Twelve-year-old Cal Blackbird trades the freedom of hobo living with his father, a World War I vet, for the regimented world of Challagi Indian Boarding School.Set in spring and summer of 1932 Depression-era America, Bruchac's (Abenaki) historical novel sees narrator Cal and his father riding the rails, eking out a meager and honest life as inseparable "knights of the road." But when Pop reads news about fellow veterans gathering in Washington, D.C., to demand payment of promised bonuses, he decides to "join [his] brother soldiers." To keep Cal safe while away, Pop tells him about their Creek heritage and enrolls him at Challagi. Even though he's only "half Creek" and has been raised white, Cal easily makes friends there with a gang of Creek boys and learns more about his language and culture in the process. Though the book is largely educational, Creek readers may notice the language discrepancy when their word for "African-American" is twice used to label a light-skinned Creek boy. Additionally, Cal's articulation of whiteness sounds more like a 21st-century adult's then a Depression-era boy's. More broadly, readers accustomed to encountering characters who struggle along their journeys may find many of the story's conflicts resolved without significant tension and absent the resonant moments that the subject matter rightly deserves.A lesser-known aspect of Native American history that promises the excitement of riding the rails yet delivers a handcar version of the boarding school experience. (list of characters, afterword) (Historical fiction. 10-14) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter One Keeping Up The red road stretches out before us, a long ribbon of light. "Keep up, Cal." I am the right size for my age, which is twelve--this being 1932 in the year of Our Lord. I can run as fast as the Dickens. But when it comes to marching I always fall behind. Despite Pop's limp, he always gets a few steps ahead of me. I cannot help but sigh. Pop doesn't hear that. Though he can still catch the songs of the birds in the trees above us--like the redbird he pointed out a mile back--real low noises escape his ears. It has been that way since the sixth of June in '18 when he was partially deafened by the booming of the big guns. We keep marching along. I'm doing a better job now of keeping up. I don't mind walking like this, mile after mile, just as long as it doesn't start my father remembering. Pop looks up at the sun. "It was hot like this that day. It was about this time," he says. "Exactly three forty-five p.m." There's a faraway look on his face now. He's telling the story to himself, almost unaware of me listening. "'Over the top and take that wood,' General Hartford orders us. And then the whistle blares. So over the top we go. Every one of us as green as grass." It's the place where Pop always pauses. Sometimes we'll walk as much as a mile before he says more. "And then the Devil's Paintbrushes opened up and down we went, like a wheat field being mowed." Another silence as another mile passes. "No," he says. "Not like wheat nor rye. Mown grass does not bleed or make the ground so slippery you can't hardly stand." He pauses, shakes his head, as if trying to wake up from a bad dream. Then he starts walking again. That faraway look is gone from his face. I'm not sure he even knew that look was there. He's finished that story for now, leaving it behind. Which is what I would like to do. But almost as soon as he started the story, as it sometimes happens, something took over. This happens to me now and then. I'm drawn backward. I find myself in the middle of someone else's life. Not remembering it or seeing it. But living it moment by moment. I'm no longer walking down a Southern road in the here and now of 1932. It's years ago--over there. I'm someone else in full uniform. Crouched next to my father in the muddy trench. I'm holding a gold pocket watch in my left hand, looking at the letters inscribed on the back. S.K.E. My heart's pounding like a drum as we wait for the signal. Sweat is beading my forehead. That loud shrill whistle sounds. We scramble up over the top, stumble forward through the broken strands of barbed wire, the half-buried bodies of men who took part in the last wave. We leap over craters left by shells. The only sounds are heavy breathing, the thudding of feet on the frozen ground, the rattle of our canteens against the metal buckles of our belts. Then the Huns open up with their MG 08 machine guns--the Devil's Paintbrushes. Bullets hiss around us, moving faster than the speed of sound, followed by the cracking of the air. Men start bowing their heads and dropping to their knees as the earth beneath us is painted with blood. Their blood. Our blood. My father falls, but I pick him up, throw him over my shoulder to carry him . . . "Cal? Cal?" I'm so lost in that vision of a France I've never really seen that I've been in a daze, not even seeing my feet crunching the red roadside gravel. I run my hands back through my long hair, waking myself back up to the real world. "Yes, sir!" I say. "Present and accounted for, sir." That makes Pop chuckle. It's not hard for me to amuse Pop, unless he is in one of his black moods. Then nothing will bring the light of a smile to his sun-browned face, even though I have to try. I take care of you, you take care of me. That's the deal, as Pop puts it. All we have is each other. I pick up my pace to match his. I'm counting my steps, keeping my face calm so as not to let on where my mind has been. Pop would feel bad if he knew where his speaking about the war sometimes leads my overactive brain. I know he always has my best interests at heart. He just wants to take good care of me. For example, to help me know what to do when there's trouble, he tells scary stories. Like the one about a giant all made of stone that likes to eat people. Or the story of monster birds that would fly down and carry away children. I do not know where he got them from, but those tales about bloodthirsty monsters are really something. He doesn't tell me them just to scare me, though. Take courage from the story, he says. In every one of those stories, those monsters end up getting defeated--usually by a boy or girl who's listened to the advice of elders and learned the monster's weakness. It's also been there in the books I used to read in the little library in the school--stories of boys managing to win against all kinds of odds. Treasure Island. Tom Sawyer. Being able to get stories like those is the thing I miss most about school. I feel the weight of the few books I do own in my pack. Mrs. Hall, who was my sixth-grade teacher, gave them to me when the school closed. She made sure every one of the few boys and girls still left when it shut down got one or two books. Me, being the one who read the most, I got three. "Here, Cal," she said. "I know you'll treasure these." And she was right about that. I'd buy more books if I had the money and a place to keep them other than my pack. One day, probably years down the road, when Pop and I have a place of our own again--as Pop promises we will--I am going to have a whole shelf of books in my room. Maybe two. But even without school, I have kept on learning. Pop knows a lot. Though he doesn't often share what he writes, he keeps a sort of journal--an old half-used ledger book that he was able to buy for a nickel from a storekeeper we did some odd jobs for. Now and then he will pull out this half pencil he keeps in his shirt pocket to write down his thoughts as he takes note of things. Maybe the weather or where we found a good place to camp, or the name of some farmer who treated us friendly-like. Some of the other things he writes down, as he remembers such things his own parents taught him, are about plants. He has read to me from that journal the names of all sorts of things and how they might be used--like how chewing green willow bark cures a headache or how tea made from pine needles is good for a cough. I'm studying the trees and plants by the road as we trudge along. It being March and us being in the southland, there's the chance of finding things ready to gather. Yesterday there was a fine cattail marsh I pointed out. No houses around. No one likely to drive us off. We took off our shoes and waded in. Red-winged blackbirds--Pop's favorite birds--were calling all around us and bobbing on the tallest stems. The young stalks pulled out easy. The bottoms of their stems were white and crunchy to taste. Better than celery. No marshes today, though. No nut trees ready to harvest yet, it being months too early. But the brush bodes well for the presence of rabbits. "See that, Pop?" I say. "Rabbit run." "All right, Cal," he replies. "Good eyes, son. After we make camp, we'll set up some snares." Sometimes, in addition to finding myself in the past in someone else's body, I can also sort of look ahead to what's coming. Where we camp for the night will be high enough on a hill that no rain will flood us out. A nice dry oak grove. I can hear Pop talking to the rabbits as he puts out the snares. "Hey, you, we need you. "Come on, rabbits, we need you. "Hey, you, we thank you. "Come on, rabbits, give us food." "Where-all you boys think you're a-headin'?" That rough, unfriendly voice jolts me out of that future to an unpleasant present. A big man on an equally big white horse is blocking the road in front of us. There's a double-barrel shotgun cradled loose over his left arm, half-pointed our way. The man's square face is as red as his hair. His mouth is set hard. "Morning, Captain," Pop says, snapping a salute. His voice is friendly and polite. I'm glad of that. When my father's voice is otherwise, things may not turn out so well. Pop's stance is relaxed and easy, not like a coiled spring. Pop drops his hand to untie his kerchief and unbutton the top of his shirt. Then he wipes his neck with that kerchief. His doing so makes that man up on his horse relax some. I know why. He's caught sight--as Pop intended--of the slightly paler skin of my father's neck and chest. Both Pop and I are dark. And we tan fast. We become brown as berries from living out as we have done since losing the house and farm when the bank failed. That man on his high horse might have been taking us for Negroes. We are in the South. Here in the South, though I have never understood why, those whose great-grandparents came from the Dark Continent are not treated fair. "Y'all serve?" the rider asks. "You could say that. Corporal. Second Division." "Belleau Wood?" the man says. Pop nods. "Soissons, too. PFC. Under Marine Brigade Commander John Lejeune, Captain." "Ah'm jes a corporal, too, brother," the red-haired man says. There's a hint of a smile on his lips as he shakes his head. "Only got that rank on account of all them officers getting kilt off. Jes' a peckerwood doughboy who didn't know no better than to join up to kill him some Huns. Never expected they would do such a job of killin' us." Neither of them says anything for a while. I try hard not to think too much about what I just heard. I don't want to find myself there again in my imagination. I concentrate hard on listening to what's close by. The soft huffing of that big horse. The sound of the red-haired man's heavy breathing. That bit of a wheeze in his throat is like what I've heard from others who served in the poisoned air of Belgium and France. I am not going to let myself get taken over. I'm here in the South. There's a redbird calling wheet-wheet-wheet-wheet wheeyou wheeyou wheeyou from somewhere farther down the red earth road. That's the best thing for me to listen to--that birdsong being repeated again and again. Wheet-wheet-wheet-wheet wheeyou wheeyou wheeyou Wheet-wheet-wheet-wheet wheeyou wheeyou wheeyou "We are," Pop finally says, "knights of the road. My son, Cal, and me. Heading to Rustburg, assuming we are on the right road." The big man pulls lightly on his reins to move his horse out of our path. He lifts his shotgun--uncocked now--up over his shoulder and points with his other hand. "Some twenty miles," he says, coughing to clear his throat. "Red House crossroad up ahead. You all want to go straight. Right turn'd take you to Appomattox." "Thank you," Pop says. "I would ride a ways with you," the man says, turning his head to the side and spitting a gob of pink phlegm, "but I'm-a due over Pamplin City. Tell you what, though." He gestures down the road with three outstretched fingers. "Third house on your left. Half mile up. My place. Wife's there. Rose. Tell her Red sent you." He claps his palm on his chest making a hollow thump, loud as a drum. "Red Campbell. She'll give you dinner. Boy of your'n looks hungry." "Thank you," Pop says, drawing himself up a bit. "But we, my boy and me, we would like to work for what's offered. Might you need some wood split or a fence mended?" Red Campbell nods as he clears his throat again. "That is how you folks be, right? Different from them beggars or bums looking for handouts." "We're hoboes, sir," I say, speaking up for the first time. It surprises me almost as much as it does Pop, who looks at me with one eyebrow raised. "We have an ethical code." Pop raises that eyebrow a little higher. Staying silent most of the time is my nature. But when I do start talking, especially about our way of life, I sometimes do go on a bit. Right now Pop is wondering if I am about to begin spouting that ethical code which he used to read me from his journal but which I now know by heart. Starting off with Decide Your Own Life, Do Not Let Another Person Run or Rule You . I could spout that out now--but I've said all I intend to say. Red laughs, loud and deep as thunder. He leans down to slap me on my back in a friendly fashion that nearly dislocates my shoulder. The grin on his face is wide as Jack's Old Lantern. "Wood splitting it is," he says. "And tell Rose to give this eth-ee-cal son of your'n the slab of corn bread she was savin' for me." He slides his shotgun into the sheath hung from his saddle, kicks his heels into the big horse's sides, and they gallop off, dry red dust rising from the road behind them. Excerpted from Two Roads by Joseph Bruchac All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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