In a state of shock that she truly has been sent back in time one hundred years, Sophie dumbly agrees to the assumption that her father sent her to the plantation from New Orleans to be raised as a lady’s maid, before he ran off to France himself. He gets a bit of an epilogue at the end, but I still craved more. I should note here that I was intrigued from the start by Robert Fairchild and dearly wished he’d have more of a role in the story. Oh, she’s still on her ancestor’s property, except now it’s a fully operational sugar plantation, with slaves and everything! Unfortunately for Sophie, when she first interacts with her great-great-great-great kin, her skin has been so browned from playing out in the sun in 1960 that they mistake her for a slave! Fortunately her Fairchild nose gives her a slight reprieve, and after briefly convening, the 1860’s Fairchilds conclude that she is the daughter of the black sheep of the family, Robert, who’s ever had contrary notions in regard to colored people. She’s sent on an adventure all right, straight back in time one hundred years to 1860. This is most certainly a lesson in ‘careful what you wish for’. Inside the overgrown garden maze on the property, Sophie encounters a strange talking creature, and tired of the boredom and semi-neglect from the adults in her life, she wishes it would send her on a storybook adventure. It doesn’t take long before Sophie is bored out of her mind with inside activities, and takes to exploring the ruins of the estate. Sophie is dumped without so much as a goodbye from her mother, into the care of her two aunts.
Unless it’s to point out her faults and failings. To say that Sophie isn’t looking forward to the weeks she’s going to be spending with her family is an understatement, but her mother’s got a new job and her father’s run off to New York with another woman and it seems like no one’s got any time for Sophie anymore. The plantation is all in the past, now and most of the estate itself has gone to seed. They’re on their way to Sophie’s grandmother’s house, the ancestral home of the Fairchilds and once the site of a prosperous sugar plantation. The book opens with Sophie, the young, teenaged protagonist, in a car with her mother, driving through Louisiana one rainy day in May. Dealing with issues of both American slavery just before the Civil War and 1960’s expectations of womanhood, femininity, and growing pains in the American South, Sherman is unafraid to cast her protagonist into the fire, giving readers a deeply moving account of the struggles of marginalized peoples in two past eras. After The Magician’s Nephew and The Neverending Story it was refreshing to read a middle grade that had some teeth. It’s rare for me to find a youth novel that combines good writing, thought provoking and dark subject matter, and a genuinely interesting story as well as Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze does.
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