This is a Newbery award winner that I read from the library while nursing, and I didn't really enjoy this one. I feel like a lot of the Newbery winners prior to this decade are focused on historical fiction to help kids learn about some aspect of American history, and this was the one focused on the slave trade. It's about a boy who gets kidnapped and forced to sail on a slave ship so that he can blow his pipe and force the slaves to dance and exercise so they stay in better condition on their journey back from Africa. The book definitely exposes the horrors of the slave trade and how awful and inhumane it is in every way. But I really can't imagine a kid reading this book and enjoying it at all. There's no feeling like the main character triumphs or like he has any power to make any decisions at all to make a difference, so it just felt really dark and scary the whole time. The book ends with the slavers being discovered by the authorities and then somehow at that exact same time a huge storm coming upon them and wrecking the ship and somehow everyone else dies except the boy and the one slave boy he is able to save, and then they somehow swim to shore and then are discovered by an escaped slave who has connections to get the slave boy to freedom somehow? It was confusing and didn't seem super believable to me. Basically, this is maybe the first Newbery winner that I am not interested in owning a copy of to keep on our shelves.
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