Starred Review Caroline Whitaker's perspective on the ongoing war with Britain shifts dramatically when her good friend Kit, age 14, is hanged before her eyes for attacking Lord Cornwallis and his troops. Soon after, Caroline's father is thrown in jail, her house is taken over by Lord Rawdon, and she is kept upstairs as a prisoner, along with her mother and her sister, Georgia Ann, who dines and flirts with Rawdon nightly. Caroline's perspective adjusts again when she must bring her brother, Johnny, back home in the company of her secret grandmother, Miz Melindy, who is a slave on the plantation. Their journey becomes both literal and figurative, as Caroline learns to rely on her common sense to escape danger and hears some home truths from her grandmother. Rinaldi's books are always impeccably researched, vividly detailed, and filled with very human characters; they are also about something that matters. Here she deals with truth, secrets, and the difficulty of determining the right thing to do. The South Carolina setting gives the novel a special flavor and provides backdrop for the swirling emotions surrounding Caroline's part negra family background, which is kept lowkey. Rinaldi's afterword will help readers sort out fictional characters from historical ones, and her bibliography is more extensive than listings appearing in many nonfiction books for this age group. (Reviewed September 15, 1998)

When Caroline leaves her family plantation--which has been commandeered as the headquarters for a regiment of the British army--in order to bring home her injured brother, she must decide where her loyalties lie. But her confusion is not only political. As the white granddaughter of a black slave, Caroline has to sort out the complexities of her family history. A detailed author's note outlines sources. Bib.

Skeletons come and go from a wealthy South Carolina family's closet when the British army arrives in this tale set during the Revolutionary War. While sister Georgia Ann has taken to dining nightly with haughty Lord Rawdon, Caroline Whitaker, 14, scorns the occupying officer; she has seen a friend hanged and her Patriot father thrown into prison. Word comes that brother Johnny, a member of the Loyalist militia, has been wounded, so Caroline and her "negra" grandmother, Miz Melindy, set out to bring him home. Caroline not only learns that Johnny has switched sides, but that her birth mother, Miz Melindy's daughter, didn't die (as she had always been told); she was shipped off to the West Indies as the price of Caroline's acceptance as a Whitaker. Deftly incorporating facts into the background but leaving most of the violence offstage, Rinaldi (Mine Eyes Have Seen, 1998, etc.) keeps the focus on her characters, developing an entertainingly contentious rapport between Caroline and Miz Melindy while strewing the cast with rough men and widowed or abandoned women. Georgia Ann eventually becomes Rawdon's doxy, then is summarily dropped from the story, and Johnny, willing to risk his life to save his slave, breaks off with the Catawba women he had been seeing for years in the name of appearances. In the end, Caroline has no trouble marrying into a white family, a seeming paradox—considering the pervasive consciousness of racial differences here—that Rinaldi doesn't explain. Anna Myers's Keeping Room (1997), a less disingenuous story set in the same place and time, offers a more direct view of the unusual brutality that characterized the war in the Carolinas. (bibliography) (Fiction. 12-15)

Gr 5-9-The prolific Rinaldi's latest piece of historical fiction focuses on the Southern colonies during the American Revolution. War reaches Camden, SC, in 1780, and Caroline Whitaker's privileged world comes undone. For the lively 14-year-old, things are already uncomfortable; her household is split between her beloved brother Johnny's Loyalist military service and her father's unabashed support for the Patriots. In rapid succession, Caroline then witnesses the brutal execution of a childhood friend, sees her father imprisoned for refusing to declare loyalty to King George, and, along with her mother and sister, becomes a prisoner in their own home when British troops occupy the plantation. The stress, fear, and confusion bring to light one of the family's greatest secrets: Caroline's birth mother, whom she never knew, was a slave in the Whitaker household. When word comes of Johnny's court-martial and brutal punishment, Caroline undertakes a journey to bring him home, accompanied by her maternal grandmother, Miz Melindy, a slave who is also a skilled healer. Both expect to face danger, but neither of them anticipates how significant their travels will be for Caroline's future. Rinaldi has incorporated prodigious historical research and provocative themes to produce a deftly plotted and fast-paced novel.-Starr E. Smith, Marymount University Library, Arlington, VA