Good Lord Bird by James McBride

This book won the National Book Award, and is on the 100 notable books for the New York Times this year, so it has gotten some critical attention.  It is yet another story set in pre-Civil War America (1856 to be exact) related to the final days of slavery.  All of which sounds very serious, but james McBride has written this as a tongue in cheek spoof rather than a damning indictment on slavery in its' final days.  Tracy Chevalier's book 'The Runaway' focuses on the Fugitive Slave laws, but McBride focuses on a historical character to tell his tale.

John Brown is the central character, and in this book, he is a bit of a crazy man.  he and his sons round up bands of like minded miltant abolishionists and remove slaves from their owners at gun point.  From the vantage point of this story, theirs is a futile effort, bound not just to fail but to get them all killed in the process.  The story is told through the eyes of a slave boy, Henry,  He is mistaken for a girl by John Brown and lives the rest of the novel out in dresses as a girl names Henrietta.  The social commentary is that the slaves all know immediately that he is a boy but the white folk are all fooled.  Not to give too much away, but racism and slavery are alive and well by book's end.

The actual meeting that John Brown had with Frederick Douglass in Rochester is portrayed in the book.  Douglass does not come off well--he is drinking and a bit of a lech in this account.  That parallels another author's recent depiction of him.  Colum McCann's book 'TransAtlantic' has Douglass' visit to Ireland in it and he is definitely trying to make time with a very young maid in the household he is staying in--I am not clear on where these are coming from, but then all that I know about Douglass is what he wrote about himself.  All in all this book covers a serious time in American History with an even hand that has a sense of humor.