Recommended Age:
12
+
Best for mature readers who enjoy historically grounded, emotionally powerful fiction that honestly examines the contradictions and cruelties of American slavery.
About the Book
Told from the perspectives of three enslaved children at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello—Beverly, Maddy, and Peter—this novel examines the daily lives, relationships, and painful contradictions of growing up enslaved on the plantation of a man who wrote 'all men are created equal.' The children grapple with questions of freedom, family, paternity, and the reality that some of them may be Jefferson's own children. A historically grounded and emotionally powerful novel.
Content Ratings
💡
Intense Themes
The novel centers on the trauma of enslavement, family separation, the denial of personhood, and the psychological burden of being enslaved by one's own father; children must navigate a world in which their freedom and family bonds are subject to the whims of white ownership.
⚔️
Moderate Violence
Enslaved people are threatened with being sold away from families, whipped, and subjected to the violence inherent in slavery; a character is beaten; the systemic violence of enslavement is depicted honestly without gratuitous detail.
Engagement:
Genre:
Historical Fiction
Published:
2011
Page Count:
352
