Nightjohn

Sarny, a 12-year-old slave girl on a tyrannically run plantation in the Deep South, becomes fascinated by Nightjohn when he's brought shackled, scarred and defiant to work alongside her comrades. When he reveals a secret mission to spread the forbidden skills of literacy amongst the slaves, Sarny is immediately pulled into a web of both triumphant and tragic possibilities. In a simple but compelling story, told in Sarny's dialect, Paulsen depicts the atrocities inflicted on the slaves with distressing clarity. The verisimilitude of the book is further emphasised by an afterword in the form of a troubled meditation on the role of slavery in American history.