Elijah of Buxton

Author Christopher Paul Curtis won the Coretta Scott King Award for this book published in 2007, Elijah of Buxton also won the Newbery Honor Medal and it is a selection of the Junior Library Guild. But I would have read this book anyway without knowing about these awards because I enjoyed Curtis' other books especially Bud, Not Buddy.

In 1859, eleven-year-old Elijah Freeman, the first free-born child in Buxton, Canada, which is a haven for slaves fleeing the American south, uses his wits and skills to try to bring to justice the lying preacher who has stolen money that was to be used to buy a family's freedom.

I love the clever way Curtis' tells this story using Elijah's own voice (including many phonetic spellings reflecting the dialect of the speaker) to recount what happened to him from events at school to catching fish (he uses a stone!) to scaring his mother by hiding a critter in her knitting basket. You will get a kick out of how Elijah and his friend Cooter misinterpret their teacher. There is one part in the book where Elijah gets a harsh lesson on why not to use the "n word". But the book wasn't all about fun stuff. Elijah (and you will, too) learns a lot about how people were treated horribly as slaves. I recommend this book to older readers, 5th and up. Let me know what you think about this story.

Here's a link to an interview with Christopher Curtis about how he came to write Elijah of Buxton.