When emancipation comes, Rosa and her younger brother, former African American slaves, walk to their new one-room school, the first they have ever known. Though white boys on the road throw rocks at them, the two children are warmly greeted by their teacher. She helps all of her students, who attend school when they can be spared from farm work, but one time she turns the children away because she fears for their safety. Another time, fire destroys the building. Still, the community pulls together and pitches in to build "Freedom's school." Told with economy and restraint, the story expresses the deep desire among the community's African American families for their children to be educated. Ransome's large-scale paintings are fluid watercolors with dramatic use of light and dark and a fine sense of composition. This handsome book makes an interesting follow-up to the writer and illustrator's other education-related picture books, including Words Set Me Free: The Story of Young Frederick Douglass (2012) and Light in the Darkness: A Story about How Slaves Learned in Secret (2013).

Gr 2-5 With the passage of the 13th Amendment, announced on the title page in a Boston Globe headline, comes the opportunity for Lizzie and her younger brother, presumably residents of the rural South, to attend school for the first timea rough wooden structure where Mizz Howard introduces the children to their letters. But getting there means encountering hostile white people, and sometimes school is canceled due to impeding threats. When the building is deliberately set afire, it is the determination of their teacher and other African Americans in the community that allows them to rebuild and rekindle hope for a brighter future. The story is illustrated with Ransome's signature lush, watercolor paintings, all spreads in warm tones of brown, gold, and red contrasted with many shades of green and deep blue. In stark contrast are the endpapers, a white chalk upper- and lowercase alphabet against solid black, symbolic of the struggle between the races. VERDICT A stunning package that adds to the body of literature documenting the African American experience. Marie Orlando, formerly at Suffolk Cooperative Library System, Bellport, NY