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Summary
Summary
Jordan Scott has made his decision. To stay in the hood. With the gang. The Cobras can be rough, but since Daddy left, they're the only ones who make him feel like he belongs to something that will help him become a man. And besides, it's not like he'll be trapped in this gang thing forever....
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
From its lurid title to its lackluster plotting and prose, this time-slip fantasy of an African-American boy who travels back to the antebellum South to be taught the lessons of slavery firsthand delivers far less than the premise might suggest. In order to become a full-fledged member of the Cobra gang, 12-year-old Jordan must raise the money for a gun. He steals his grandfather's gold watch, which once belonged to the slaveholder who owned one of Jordan's forebears. On his way to the pawnshop, Jordan rushes through an underpass and suddenly finds himself on a Southern plantation. Whitmore (The Bread Winner) touches upon many of the evils of slaverybackbreaking labor, squalid living conditions, physical punishment, auctions, death, even, glancingly, miscegenationbut with the formulaic writing and superficial characterizations, readers are not likely to be moved. The lesson that Jordan takes back to the citythat gangs are the contemporary version of slaverymay be a profound one, but here it seems facile and unconvincing. Ages 11-up. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
This clumsily written historical fantasy sends a twelve-year-old African-American boy back in time via his grandfather's pocket watch in a heavy-handed attempt to draw parallels between slavery and modern gang life. The characters from both time periods are clichéd, and the dialogue, particularly that which uses slang and dialect, sounds unnatural. From HORN BOOK Fall 1999, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
Gr. 5^-8. Jordan, 12, is about to join a rough street gang when he suddenly finds himself back in time with his slave ancestors, forced to pick cotton under the lash, sold at a slave auction, and then finally on his way to freedom on the Underground Railroad. At the end, he returns to the present time with a heartfelt sense of history and family identity, and he finds the courage to risk his life and leave the gang. The time travel will draw readers in and so will the well-researched detail of what it was like to be a slave; but, unfortunately, the fiction is generic, a kind of contrived docunovel, with characters explaining the situation to the jarringly naive newcomer ("Can't you sneak out on your lunch hour?" Jordan asks a slave kid). Perhaps the most dramatic part of this book is the long note by the white author: after the book was accepted for publication, a distant relative's genealogical research turned up a long-suppressed family secret: Arvella Whitmore is, in fact, the great-granddaughter of a slave. --Hazel Rochman
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-Determined not to move to an integrated suburb, 12-year-old Jordan Henning Scott plans to run away and live with his newfound gang friends, but the heirloom watch he steals from his grandfather to finance this venture transports him back in time. Finding himself in the old South, Jordan meets Uriah, a slave boy who takes him to the Henning plantation. Jordan is presumed to be a runaway slave, put to exhausting work picking cotton, and whipped when he collapses. After he tries to run away, he is sold to a slave trader and then bought by a sympathizer who gives him freedom papers and promises to send him to Canada if he will return to the Henning plantation and convince Uriah to leave. The master, who turns out to be Uriah's father, had recently brought the boy into the big house and given him his watch for safekeeping. When Jordan finds the watch again, he is returned to his own time. Left behind, Uriah takes the papers and Jordan's name to Canada and becomes Jordan's great-great-great-great-grandfather. Readers who can overlook awkward dialogue and an unlikely plot will be caught up in the boy's efforts to survive and appropriately appalled by the details of daily life. The premise of a modern eye looking at the grim realities of slavery was used more successfully, but for older readers, by Octavia Butler in Kindred (Beacon, 1988); Trapped, however, might intrigue readers looking for quick-moving historical fiction.-Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Whitmore (The Bread Winner, 1990) writes about a modern child who is uninterested in the suffering of his ancestors until he is forced to live it. Jordan, told to bring money to the gang he has just joined, steals his grandfather's pocket watch, which transports him back in time to the days of slavery. He is put to work as a slave on the plantation where his ancestor, Uriah, is a boy. Determined to find the watch--the key to his return--Jordan works in the cotton fields, is whipped, gets sold, and joins the Underground Railroad before finding his way back to his own time, where the gang waits to make an example of him for trying to get out. This is an exciting read; Whitmore packs in as much information about slavery as possible, which only occasionally interferes with the flow of the story. Jordan's awakening to his heritage and to the consequences of his actions in the present are well done and, in the context of the story, believable. (Fiction. 11-13) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
