It doesn’t take long before Sophie is bored out of her mind with inside activities, and takes to exploring the ruins of the estate. Sophie is dumped without so much as a goodbye from her mother, into the care of her two aunts. Unless it’s to point out her faults and failings. To say that Sophie isn’t looking forward to the weeks she’s going to be spending with her family is an understatement, but her mother’s got a new job and her father’s run off to New York with another woman and it seems like no one’s got any time for Sophie anymore.
The plantation is all in the past, now and most of the estate itself has gone to seed. They’re on their way to Sophie’s grandmother’s house, the ancestral home of the Fairchilds and once the site of a prosperous sugar plantation.
The book opens with Sophie, the young, teenaged protagonist, in a car with her mother, driving through Louisiana one rainy day in May. Dealing with issues of both American slavery just before the Civil War and 1960’s expectations of womanhood, femininity, and growing pains in the American South, Sherman is unafraid to cast her protagonist into the fire, giving readers a deeply moving account of the struggles of marginalized peoples in two past eras. After The Magician’s Nephew and The Neverending Story it was refreshing to read a middle grade that had some teeth. It’s rare for me to find a youth novel that combines good writing, thought provoking and dark subject matter, and a genuinely interesting story as well as Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze does.
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