the underground railroad book sparknotes

Haworth-Attard seems to have deliberately chosen a family out of tune with their times: 1915 was a good year on the prairies, but not for the Browns. She makes friends, she discovers her own competencies, she accepts that they will not be returning to the prairies, and she becomes open to the particular beauty of her new home.

The turning point in this narrative is not so much a change in external circumstances as a psychological change in Margaret. Margaret’s beloved older brother enlists for the war and leaves. Life with the relatives is fraught with tensions for everyone. Brown gives birth prematurely and is ill in hospital. Brown fails to find steady work and his health deteriorates. Protagonist Margaret is heartbroken to leave her home, her friends and, most of all, her land. A hailstorm that decimates their crop is the last in a string of disabling misfortunes, forcing the Browns to sell up and move to London, Ontario, where they take refuge with an uncle. The Brown family are Saskatchewan farmers. In Flying Geese author Barbara Haworth-Attard deals with a much less tidy piece of the past. Readers of Barbara Smucker’s Underground to Canada will feel right at home in this novel. For the younger child it is simply enough to know that the girl was compelled to leave. A reader old enough to imagine this horror will do so. For example, one slave girl makes a break for freedom because she learns she is about to become a “breeding slave.” Schwartz doesn’t elaborate. She strikes a good balance between conveying the horror of slavery and protecting the young reader. From this material Schwartz has created a satisfying, well-shaped story, relatively unsophisticated and suited to younger readers. The moral landscape is also clear, with cruel slavecatchers on one side and brave underground railroad “conductors” on the other. Tools to help achieve the goal are strength, idealism, co-operation, and shared knowledge. The barriers to the goal are weather, enemies, and despair. The route to the goal is a physical journey. If I Just Had Two Wings by Virginia Schwartz, a Canadian living in New York, is the story of Phoebe, a 13-year-old slave who escapes the Alabama plantation to travel the underground railroad to freedom in Canada. The challenge for the contemporary writer is to harness that storytelling energy while presenting the past in all its messiness and ambiguity. They were also suspenseful, exciting, and emotionally engaging, inspiring me to fierce loyalties.

The olden-days books that I read as a child were very tidy, partisan, Eurocentric, and simplistic.

How tidy is history? It’s a question that every writer of historical fiction must contemplate, especially those who write for the young, for whom the impulse to narrative neatness is strong.

The underground railroad book sparknotes