Amina Luqman-DawsonFREEWATER

Writing her very first novel, Amina Luqman-Dawson has created a genuine masterpiece of young adult fiction that richly deserves the very high honors it has won, namely the Newbery and Coretta Scott King Medals. The sense of respect for the multiple narrators is wonderful. They are never referred to as slaves. Rather, they are collectively known as enslaved souls. One of the highlights of Freewater is that most of the chapters are revealed by young people as the predominant voices. Young readers will easily identify with these heroes. The narrative reads like a thriller. It is hard not to cheat and jump to the final chapters to discover the heroic outcome of the chief protagonists. Freewater will engross adult readers as well as young adults. Readers learn a lot about Maroon Communities, both in the past and even into the present. These miraculous free communities existed not only in the American South but in the Caribbean and in South America, especially in Brazil. Many readers have been educated to know about the Underground Railroad and flights to freedom in the North and in Canada by enslaved souls, but many readers will learn about such havens as Freewater for the first time. The author provides a highly informative afterword, but young historians will want to combine reading the novel Freewater with Internet searches. Freewater opens the eyes of readers in so many, many ways. The lyrical text is magical. This is a classic for the ages. It is a genuine masterpiece.

My 9 year old is part of a book club. He had this book to read and I making read out loud. I did not want him to stop reading and he would wake up and read a chapter before school. Great story.

Bought this for my classroom, I read every book before I read it to my class to make sure it’s quality, appropriate, and will be beneficial for them. I got sucked in and genuinely enjoyed the story. I couldn’t put the book down. This is a fantastic story to introduce children to the hard topic of slavery while also telling a beautiful woven story of some who escaped.

As it happens, I read Freewater not long after reading Octavia E. Butler's classic Kindred. Although they are very different books, comparisons are irresistible. Both depict the lives of slaves on an antebellum southern plantation. Kindred is not a fun book. The characters repeatedly experience dehumanizing brutality and degradation. Amina Luqman-Dawson's Freewater, in contrast, *IS* a fun book, and yes, I enjoyed it. Of course, Freewater is targeted (and well targeted, in my opinion) at middle-grade children. How does Luqman-Dawson write a book about the experience of slavery that a ten-year-old kid can have fun reading?You would guess that she softens the depiction. You would be right, but only a little. For instance, a certain racial epithet that appears 56 times in Kindred is absent from Freewater. And certain horrors of the treatment of slaves that are not suitable for young kids remain unmentioned. However, Luqman-Dawson's depiction of slavery is not gentle. Violence and degradation are there on the page.Her main strategy, though, is to show slaves and their children resisting. She uses the true story of the maroons for this purpose. In "A Note from Amina" she describes'...those who found refuge deep in the swamps and forests of the American South and even began secret communities. Research and historical literature refer to these secret communities as “maroon communities” and the people who resided in them as “maroons.”'Her fictional swamp town of Freewater is such a community. Some characters of the novel are members of the Freewater community and some are residents of a nearby plantation. The story is told from the points of view of many of these characters. The chapters told by Homer, a twelve-year-old runaway slave boy, are in the first person, thus making him the central character."A Note from Amina" ends with these words,"This history is a reminder that wherever African enslavement existed in the Americas, a culture (and even communities) of extraordinary resistance was always present."This focus on fighting back works! Bizarre though it sounds, Freewater is a fun story about slavery suitable for kids.

I love the vivid and descriptive writing style of this book. The author made you feel like you were in the story. I love how this book creates an entry point into the discussion on maroons and how African people were always resisting enslavement and oppression.