The Letter Writer

This is the first Ann Rinaldi book I have read that I think needs to have a warning attached, as it involves some very, very graphic violence.

It's the story of Virginia in 1830, of an eleven-year-old girl named Juliet, and of a slave uprising. Southerners fear slave uprisings terribly. Even with that, though, many slave-owners basically tortured their slaves, whipping them for any reason whatever or even for no reason at all. Some would even do this so much that a slave would die, yet the owner would not be arrested or tried.

Slaves were considered property, not necessarily humans. They could be bought and sold. Families could be split apart by this, a mother, for example, watching as her children were sold into slavery and sent somewhere where she might never see them again, yet there was nothing that could be done.

Which is a factor in why there was a fear of uprisings, the people doing these terrible things worried that someday the Blacks would seek there revenge.

This book concerns just one of those times, when a slave named Nat Turner appears to be a religious man. He tricks Juliet into making a copy of a map for him, and he uses that map, plus other slaves he has gathered to his 'cause' to lead a slave uprising. The group ends up killed 57 white people, most of them women and children.

Juliet is worried that the map she made will be found and she will be blamed for what happened, even though she got him the map thinking he was just going to do some preaching to Blacks on various plantations.

It's a harsh book, but well done.

Main Index

Yadult Index