A Book

January's Sparrow

By: Patricia Polacco 

Before we went back to school I was searching the web for some reading lessons. I found some reviews on the book January's Sparrow that captured my attention. I was excited to find and read this book. As my team was planning last week the standard we are getting ready to focus on deals with students being able to understand how visual elements contribute to the tone or beauty of a text. One of the teachers mentioned that she used January's Sparrow with her students in previous years. This caught my attention being that I had just read such wonderful reviews. I was excited to get busy reading to prepare lessons.

I was captivated with all 95 pages of what is probably the longest picture book I've ever read. The illustrations could tell the story by themselves and will go along perfectly with describing the tone of the story. 

Here's the gist...

After a member of their extended slave family, January, escapes and is brought back to a Kentucky plantation where he is brutally whipped, the Crosswhite family decides to escape up north to Canada. On the way, they stop at a small Michigan abolitionist town. The story is told from the point of Sadie, the family’s young daughter, who looked upon January as an older brother, with January’s interjections to relate the story from an adult point of view. Sadie’s favorite toy is a wooden sparrow that January carved for her, but on the night her family leaves to cross the river into Indiana, she realizes, heartbroken, that she has left it behind in Kentucky and her family tells her that it’s too dangerous to retrieve it. All seems to go well for the Crosswhite family once they arrive in Marshall, Michigan—her family find jobs and Sadie goes to school and finds a friend in a little white girl whose name is Polly Hobart and whose father is the town judge. And although the Crosswhite children have been warned never to tell anyone that they are escaped slaves because a law exists that requires escaped slaves to be returned to the south. Despite this admonition, Sadie reveals to Polly that her family are escaped slaves, and shortly thereafter January’s sparrow appears on their doorstep with a note that reads, “I have found you.” Sadie is terrified—has her new friend betrayed her, or have the so-called paddy-rollers come to take them back to Kentucky? One winter night the Crosswhites’ worst fears are confirmed when the paddy-rollers arrive at their doorstep. The whole community, black and white, turn out to defend the family of escaped slaves, among them, January, who displays his horrific scars and declares that this is what will happen to the Crosswhites if they are forced to return to Kentucky. The crowd decides that this is a matter for Judge Hobart to decide, who jails the three paddy-rollers for three days until the Crosswhites can escape to Canada and to freedom.

I am excited to share this heart touching story with the minds in my room. 

Sources: 

Polacco, P. (2009.) Philomel Books: New York.

Good Books for Young Minds

xoxo-Kim