Book: The freedom maze
Jul. 25th, 2012 01:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Delia Sherman
Details: (c) 2011 Delia Sherman (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
deliasherman); Pub 2011 Big Mouth House; ISBN 978-1-931520-40-9
Verdict: The freedom maze is well-written if a little moralistic.
Reasons for reading it: There was a fair bit of buzz about it being the most awesome contemporary YA fantasy out there. And I wanted something to read on a train journey with lots of annoying changes, so a YA novel that was on my ereader seemed a good choice.
How it came into my hands: Half price sale at Weightless Books which I've found to be a pretty good source of DRM-free ebooks.
I enjoyed The freedom maze but I am not quite sure what the fuss was about; it seems pretty much a conventional YA fantasy of a child meeting a magical creature who transports her into the past, where she learns important lessons. It explicitly acknowledges antecedents like E Nesbitt and Edward Eager and it's very much in similar vein. The particular past that Sophie is transported to is a Louisiana sugar plantation just before the Civil War. The framing story is set in 1960, where Sophie's family are unthinkingly racist; the magic and a slightly contrived plot cause her to be viewed as a "light-skinned" slave in the 1860 setting. So, ok, she learns that the past was not only unglamourous but pretty dreadful unless you were rich and white, and that slavery is Bad.
It's perhaps because of reading it as an adult, but I think even when I was in the target agegroup I would have found it a bit heavy-handed and didactic. That said, in spite of its hamfisted Moral Lessons, it's pacy and exciting and vivid. I liked the way the magic works, and the inclusion of elements of African-American religion and mysticism. Even reading as an adult I was quite on edge to see how Sophie would get out of the various dire situations in which a twentieth century kid trying to pretend to be a slave (and in some ways actually a slave, given she was treated as one by everyone she encountered in the 19th century) could find herself. Setting your kids' fantasy in a situation as dire as a slave plantation is a tricky thing to pull off; it's hard to write something that is suitable for young readers without sugar-coating the real historical horrors of slavery. tFM goes into a fair amount of detail about whipping, and makes mention of rape and its consequences as well as things like the physical injuries that could be suffered by people who were regarded as property and only protected in so far as injuring your labour force was more costly than cutting safety corners. But it's never grisly, which is good both because you could recommend the book to the kind of reader who is young emotionally but precocious intellectually, and because it avoids coming across as misery porn.
Especially considering its YA audience, tFM is at least reasonably nuanced. It's no Uncle Tom's Cabin, all the characters, slaves as well as owners, are morally complex. There's some interesting subtext that a skilled reader might pick up about the implications of Sophie's ancestors being the "enlightened" kind of slave owners. In some ways the framing story is less nuanced, because the reader is prodded to immediately side against the adults around Sophie who won't let her play with "colored" children and oppose desegregation. I thought Sophie's relationship with her mother and grandmother was the weak point of the book; all they ever do is complain that Sophie is unladylike and express nostalgia for the antebellum world of their ancestors. So they're basically just straw people for Sophie to rebel against when she learns her Moral Lesson that you shouldn't judge people by skin colour.
tFM tries very hard to get away from presenting the African-American characters as being there only to teach the nice white girl her important Moral Lesson. Given the nature of the book, with a white heroine finding herself in the slave quarters, this is only partly successful. But for example I liked the fact that once Sophie has performed her destined act of bravery that allows her to return to her own time, she wants to know what happened to all the people she met while she was living the past, and is informed that that's not her story any more. And of course there's a degree of poignancy to her inability to find any substantial written records of the African-American people she met, while her white ancestors are thoroughly documented.
I'm not sure I'd particularly want to give a child this in preference to, say, Five children and It or Tom's Midnight Garden. To a kid born this millennium, the pre-Civil Rights 60s of the framing story is hardly more familiar than the framing stories of similar, older books, so there's no advantage there. Basically tFM is very much the sort of book that wins children's literature prizes, which is not to say it doesn't deserve them, but although it's a good story, it's also a bit morally improving for my taste.
Details: (c) 2011 Delia Sherman (
deliasherman); Pub 2011 Big Mouth House; ISBN 978-1-931520-40-9Verdict: The freedom maze is well-written if a little moralistic.
Reasons for reading it: There was a fair bit of buzz about it being the most awesome contemporary YA fantasy out there. And I wanted something to read on a train journey with lots of annoying changes, so a YA novel that was on my ereader seemed a good choice.
How it came into my hands: Half price sale at Weightless Books which I've found to be a pretty good source of DRM-free ebooks.
I enjoyed The freedom maze but I am not quite sure what the fuss was about; it seems pretty much a conventional YA fantasy of a child meeting a magical creature who transports her into the past, where she learns important lessons. It explicitly acknowledges antecedents like E Nesbitt and Edward Eager and it's very much in similar vein. The particular past that Sophie is transported to is a Louisiana sugar plantation just before the Civil War. The framing story is set in 1960, where Sophie's family are unthinkingly racist; the magic and a slightly contrived plot cause her to be viewed as a "light-skinned" slave in the 1860 setting. So, ok, she learns that the past was not only unglamourous but pretty dreadful unless you were rich and white, and that slavery is Bad.
It's perhaps because of reading it as an adult, but I think even when I was in the target agegroup I would have found it a bit heavy-handed and didactic. That said, in spite of its hamfisted Moral Lessons, it's pacy and exciting and vivid. I liked the way the magic works, and the inclusion of elements of African-American religion and mysticism. Even reading as an adult I was quite on edge to see how Sophie would get out of the various dire situations in which a twentieth century kid trying to pretend to be a slave (and in some ways actually a slave, given she was treated as one by everyone she encountered in the 19th century) could find herself. Setting your kids' fantasy in a situation as dire as a slave plantation is a tricky thing to pull off; it's hard to write something that is suitable for young readers without sugar-coating the real historical horrors of slavery. tFM goes into a fair amount of detail about whipping, and makes mention of rape and its consequences as well as things like the physical injuries that could be suffered by people who were regarded as property and only protected in so far as injuring your labour force was more costly than cutting safety corners. But it's never grisly, which is good both because you could recommend the book to the kind of reader who is young emotionally but precocious intellectually, and because it avoids coming across as misery porn.
Especially considering its YA audience, tFM is at least reasonably nuanced. It's no Uncle Tom's Cabin, all the characters, slaves as well as owners, are morally complex. There's some interesting subtext that a skilled reader might pick up about the implications of Sophie's ancestors being the "enlightened" kind of slave owners. In some ways the framing story is less nuanced, because the reader is prodded to immediately side against the adults around Sophie who won't let her play with "colored" children and oppose desegregation. I thought Sophie's relationship with her mother and grandmother was the weak point of the book; all they ever do is complain that Sophie is unladylike and express nostalgia for the antebellum world of their ancestors. So they're basically just straw people for Sophie to rebel against when she learns her Moral Lesson that you shouldn't judge people by skin colour.
tFM tries very hard to get away from presenting the African-American characters as being there only to teach the nice white girl her important Moral Lesson. Given the nature of the book, with a white heroine finding herself in the slave quarters, this is only partly successful. But for example I liked the fact that once Sophie has performed her destined act of bravery that allows her to return to her own time, she wants to know what happened to all the people she met while she was living the past, and is informed that that's not her story any more. And of course there's a degree of poignancy to her inability to find any substantial written records of the African-American people she met, while her white ancestors are thoroughly documented.
I'm not sure I'd particularly want to give a child this in preference to, say, Five children and It or Tom's Midnight Garden. To a kid born this millennium, the pre-Civil Rights 60s of the framing story is hardly more familiar than the framing stories of similar, older books, so there's no advantage there. Basically tFM is very much the sort of book that wins children's literature prizes, which is not to say it doesn't deserve them, but although it's a good story, it's also a bit morally improving for my taste.
