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Roll of Thunder substitute


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Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is our next assigned book, but dd has already read it (and its sequel). Are there any other books at about the same level that cover the Jim Crow south? I don't want anything with sexual violence, which nixes a lot of the higher level books.

 

Thanks!

 

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Lions of Little Rock might work. It takes place the year after the Little Rock Nine enrolled in Central High School. and deals with the closing of the Little Rock school districts so that no more African American students could be enrolled in white schools. An AA girl who can pass as white attends a Jr. high anyway where she befriends the main character of the book, a white girl. Of course, the girl gets caught and there is fall out in the community over it.

 

I read it for the first time this fall and thought it was excellent.

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Hm. The Mighty Miss Malone covers the same time period and racism, but not so much the South. Celeste's Harlem Renaissance is set a little earlier, handles racism but - again, more in Harlem. One Crazy Summer covers the Black Panthers in California, so different time period and also not quite "Jim Crow", but still racism. Freedom Maze does have aspects of Jim Crow... but it mostly takes place in the Antebellum South. (The protagonist thinks she's in Half Magic or The Time Garden, but actually she's in The Devil's Arithmetic, but with slavery. Unfortunately, while she's read Edward Eager, Jane Yolen had yet to become a big name author, and so the protagonist is completely unprepared for the life-changing trip through the past.)

 

I think what I'm accidentally trying to get at is that black people and racism exist in books set in times and places other than "slavery" and "Jim Crow".

 

Lions of Little Rock is also a good book. However, as a general principle, I'm a little uncomfortable with reading books ostensibly about racism in the South which are really about white people's personal growth. It's not that they can't be great books, it's just that it seems that often they become the default texts, and that's just not right.

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I actually like it a bit more than Bud's book, which is why I always recommend that one and not the other one.

 

(Also, upon reflection, Freedom Maze is also about a white person's personal growth... but part of the personal growth is realizing that she's definitely mixed somewhere in her family tree, and her family freaking out over things like her getting a tan or wearing her hair loose is part of that. So, yeah....)

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How about Sounder?

 

It's dramatically shorter and simpler language (though I don't think it's that it's younger in terms of age to read exactly... just targeted differently, very different book). Same era - pre-civil rights era Jim Crow south. And deals with sharecropping as well - which is different from the characters in the family in Roll of Thunder, but is exactly what they fear and what their neighbors live. The time period and setting of Sounder are much more vague, but I think it could fit in.

 

I sort of agree with Tanaqui about Lions of Little Rock. It's a great book and worth reading just because it's worth a read (and I think I have a thank you in the acknowledgements - Kristen Levine was briefly in my critique group and I had the pleasure of reading an early draft of it), but as a fill in for Roll of Thunder, I think it would be ideal to have another African American author and perspective.

 

Alternately, there are a lot more than two books that come after Roll of Thunder (I think she wrote 7?). She could absolutely just read another one.

 

 

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I will agree with Sounder. The setting could be in a number of decades, but requires a certain amount of history to know when it could be set. This could lend to some of the specific practices that AA were subjected to in the justice system, the limited income options, and just a lot of little details in the simplicity that really paint how bad it was.

 

As a Caucasian girl raised on the west coast by a very welcoming family, it was a great eye opener to how bad, and how recent, these problems were (are).

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