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Title: A competent introduction for small children: helping kids to empathize with slaves
Review: With a fast-paced narrative and a emphatic tone, this book helps children to see slavery from the perspective of those who experienced it most brutally. For better for for worse it softens the horror considerably, making slavery awful, but hardly the abomination that it was. I suppose for little ones it might be better that way. The illustrations are merely adequate and the text has a fairly casual tone. At times the grammar seems almost childlike. Maybe the language is meant to help draw young ones into the story. The overall effect of the book, though, is to offer small children some sense of what it was like to be a slave and to try to escape its horrors.
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