James McBride's terrific novel tells the tall tale of Osawatomie John Brown from the perspective of a 12 year old negro boy who spends the whole story pretending to be a girl. It's an interesting device, reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn, and it permits the same type of candid, commonsensical observation of the absurd lives of adults. As a result, I felt like it dramatized the terrorism at the core of the slave era even better than something like Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad. Telling the story from the often comic perspective of a child takes away some of the explicit moral outrage, but more effectively conveys the humanity of the situation. And pairing the childish self-centeredness of Henri/etta off against the laughably insane Christianity of the white savior John creates a complex symmetry that ends up being really powerful.
Also, it's a great shoot-em-up action-adventure story. Go read it.
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