Song Yet Sung by James McBride

This novel is a fictional story that showed us a glimpse of what it might have been like for some slaves trying to escape to freedom.

We start with The Dreamer, she is a beautiful young women who dreams the future. She had ran away but got caught by a slave trader how locked her in the attic with several other slaves. They were waiting to be sold. The Dreamer was able to break them out. So now we have The Dreamer on the run again. This time she has the slave trader and The Gimp chasing her. The Gimp was hired by her owner to track her down and bring her back.

Mix into this story Amber, Wiley, and Mary. They are slaves for a widow with some small children. Amber is part of The Gospel, or underground railroad. He helps try and get The Dreamer to safety. However, that doesn't happen as expected. The oldest boy for the family that owns Amber is stolen. Wiley chases after the man who stole him but soon looses him. Wiley is found by the slave trader who is looking for The Dreamer and even though he isn't a runaway, she captures him and makes him out to be one anyway. Amber is also caught by somebody from the slave traders group.

There are several more characters in this book also. We also have several different story lines, or history for some of the characters. Usually, I would be confused and not like that there were so many stories and histories for these characters. However, it worked really well with this story. The characters that he gave backgrounds too might not have been the most important, but they were very important to the story.

I thought it was very interesting to see how the slaves communicated without the white man figuring it out. I know we learn a little about this in school, like how blankets mean different things, but it was really interested to read about in the story. I know the story is fictional and I know the author did research for it to. I have no way of knowing if the communication methods he used are real or not, but they are very believable and add to the story.

>br>This subject of this book was interesting to me too. I've always been interested in reading about slavery and the underground railroad, so this was a good book for me. Overall, I really enjoyed the book and am glad I read it.

new author/fiction/359