Author: Ellen Levine
Informational Nonfiction
This book provides a lot of background information as well as a few individual accounts about the Underground Railroad. I think the best part about it is how it is organized into questions you would ask if you were to research this topic. It then provides the answers to those many questions but I like how it could be used to introduce that type of research question brainstorming to students. I also think it is beneficial because it tries to put the reader in the position of a slave traveling on the Underground Railroad. This provides a whole new perspective on this topic, one I've never considered so deeply and opened my eyes to new information. However, there were a couple issues I felt with this book. I understand that the series is credible and trustworthy, but just looking through the book, I found no evidence of research or citing of sources. Again I know that it is part of a series that is well known, but I found a lot of the text to be somewhat misleading. As a reader, I read some of the portions with the understanding that most runaway slaves went to Canada, or that every boat or wagon had a secret compartment and sliding panel. I know these are huge assumptions that I know better than to make, but I would question if younger students would have prior knowledge to look at these stories and see them as individual cases and not overarching facts. Also, on one page the book provided examples of advertisements that slave owners wrote for their runaway slaves; are these exact word-for-word real ads or are the paraphrased and made to be examples by the author? I do not mean to discredit the book, I found it very informational and I personally learned a lot about this topic that I did not know before, I am simply posing some questions I thought about as I was reading.
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