[This review is taken from one I posted to the livejournal community, Writers of Color 50 Book Challenge.]

I won this book as a prize when I was in second grade and I've read it many times between now and then. It's a novel-length (309 pages) book for children, but unlike much YA fiction it has a lot going on in the way of plot, characters and themes.

First of all it's the story of Pretty Pearl, god child from Mount Kenya, and how she adventures with her big brother, the best god John de Conquer, across the Atlantic by way of a slave ship to the soils of Georgia. There they wait and watch the toil and sadness of black folks in America, till after the Civil War. Then John de Conquer lets Pretty Pearl go off (with her chosen spirit companions, whose names I just like to say: Dwahro, the Hide-Behind, Hodag, and the Fool-la-fafa) into the woods in search of the Inside People, a community of ex-slaves hiding in the wilderness.

In Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? (another book I read not long ago), Beverly Tatum digresses a time or two to tell about how she taught her children about African-American history. She says that her problem was to make them aware of slavery before they had to hear about it in school, in a truthful way yet without frightening them (her sons were around 3-5 when they talked about these things) and without presenting slaves as simply victims, as often happens in public school history lessons.

I mention this because although Pretty Pearl isn't for children that young, it is full of wonderful, African-American-centric history lessons. Hamilton shows the reader brief, haunting images of pre-colonial Africa, the slave trade and a slave ship, slavery in the American South, and the lives of some black folks after Emancipation. She doesn't go into graphic detail, but she conveys to some degree the sorrow and pain of those times. But her most important historical accomplishment is on the side of hope. Her characters--gods, gods disguised as/working with ex-slaves, the ex-slaves themselves, and their Cherokee allies--are all very much agents. Whether, in a Trickster-like scene, giving some white would-be lynchers their just desserts, or coordinating and creating an entire community, the characters in this book positively affect their world, in spite of continual threats around them.

I think the best use one could put this book to would be to read it out loud, serial-fashion, to a group of 4th- or 5th-graders, accompanied by discussions about African-American history and tradition. The out-loud part is essential, something I really wish I'd experienced, because Hamilton's language and the voices she gives her different characters are lyrical, wise, and more than occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. But (read out loud or not) I think most of us grown-ups can enjoy it too.