North to Freedom

One of the finest children's novels ever written, this breathtaking adventure packs an emotional wallop and an unusual depth of compassionate understanding into a book kids have trouble putting down. Only once in a great while does a book with this kind of power come along. It has all the elements of the ideal children's book: a riveting plot, a powerfully sympathetic main character, and an intriguing point of view. But it goes far beyond the usual children's literature, with layers of intellectual and emotional depth that keep readers coming back to it again and again.

David's first encounters with such things as bright colors, a bath, and good people are touching and, amazingly, exciting. His convictions are well reasoned and often cause young readers to evaluate their own ideas about suiting their actions to their beliefs. Many children at this age find in David a unique role model whose goodness comes from indomitable strength and courage. The reader sees through David's fresh eyes the ordinary things of everyday life. An orange, a beautiful landscape, a school, all suddenly appear as the miracles they are. And as David constructs his own relationship with "the God of the green pastures and still waters" from fragments of the Bible and his own perception of the world, the reader hears the ancient words anew. North to Freedom is hard to put down, and harder to forget.