![]() However these books are not new, not second- hand, not fifth or sixth-hand even, but twelfth-hand. ![]() Books are scarce, but new books even scarcer. When they arrive at school the children discover that they are to have new textbooks, readers. ![]() It is the nineteen-thirties, the years of the Great Depression, and everyone is poor, but the black families are poorest of all. Cassie, her brothers and their friend, TJ, don't have a school bus, because they are black, and they go to the school for black children. ![]() It is an impossible feat to stay clean, especially when the school bus taking the white children to school makes a daily sport of speeding up as it passes them, spewing clouds of red dust, or waves of red mud which cover them from head to foot unless they leap into the undergrowth on the side of the path. It is the first day of the school year, and in honour of that Cassie Logan and her brothers Stacey, Christopher-John and Little Man are wearing their Sunday clothes. It is a long walk to school, through miles of dirty, unyielding red Mississippi dust in the warm months, and through miles of dirtier, even more unyielding red Mississippi mud in the rainy ones. ![]() I think it's one of those books every child should read and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it for any confident reader between 9 and 15. Summary: One of the great children's American classics, Mildred D Taylor's novel of Southern apartheid works both as a story and piece of history. ![]()
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