Author: Ellen Levine
Illustrator: Kadir Nelson
Awards:Caldecott Honor book
Grade level: 2nd-5th grade
This book is absolutely amazing! It is about a young boy named Henry and talks about the life of a slave. He is torn apart from his mother at a young age and goes through many challenges to begin his own family. Henry eventually grows older and has an amazing wife and children. Henry's wife, Nancy, was also a slave, but both of their masters agreed to let them get married. For a while everything was going great, but Nancy's master lost a great deal of money and had to sell Nancy and the children. This tore Henry's heart apart, and he was sad for many weeks. He then decided he wanted to try and become a free man, and with the help of a white man who disagreed with slavery, Henry squeezed into a box and was shipped to where he could be a free man.
This book is amazing, and I would definitely have it in my classroom! It teaches children about how times used to be very different previously, and how much the world has changed. I put an appropriate grade level to be 2nd-5th, because younger children might not be able to grasp the concept of slavery and what exactly it was. An idea for a unit on this book could be to discuss the book with the class and talk about their ideas about why they think Henry felt like he had to be in a box to be free, along with other topics.
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