Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom by Lynda Blackmon Lowery

Tricked out with a ribbon, foil highlights on the jacket and portrait galleries at each chapter’s head by Ireland’s leading illustrator, this handsome package offers British readers an orgy of self-congratulatory historical highlights. (map, author's note, author Q&A) (Adventure. Even if some hairbreadth escapes test credulity, this is a great next read for fans of our nearest ape cousins or survival adventure. The lessons Sophie learns about her childhood home, love and what it means to be endangered will resonate with readers.

Realistic characters (ape and human) deal with disturbing situations described in graphic, but never gratuitous detail. Schrefer jumps from his usual teen suspense to craft this well-researched tale of jungle survival set during a fictional conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Unable to take Otto out of the country, she decides finding her mother hundreds of miles to the north is her only choice. War breaks out, and after missing a U.N. flight out, Sophie must hide herself and Otto from violent militants and starving villagers. A week before Sophie's to return home to her father in Miami, her mother must take advantage of a charter flight to relocate some apes, and she leaves Sophie with Otto and the sanctuary workers. Though her Congolese mother is not pleased Sophie paid for the ape, she is proud that Sophie works to bond with Otto, the baby. On her way to spend the summer at the bonobo sanctuary her mother runs, 14-year-old Sophie rescues a sickly baby bonobo from a trafficker. Vivid details and the immediacy of Lowery’s voice make this a valuable primary document as well as a pleasure to read.Ĭongolese-American Sophie makes a harrowing trek through a war-torn jungle to protect a young bonobo. Appendices discuss voting rights and briefly profile people who died on or around “Bloody Sunday.” Double-page spread color illustrations between chapters, smaller retro-style color pictures and black-and-white photographs set in generous white space will appeal even to reluctant readers. Lowery’s simple, chronological narrative opens and closes with lyrics of freedom songs.

The terror of that beating haunted her on the march to Montgomery, but she gained confidence from facing her fear and joining forces with so many, including whites whose concern amazed her after a childhood of segregation. At a protest on “Bloody Sunday,” earlier in 1965, a state trooper beat her so badly she needed 35 stitches in her head. The youngest person on the march, she’d already been jailed nine times as a protester, once for six days and once in a hot, windowless “sweatbox” where all the girls passed out. In this vibrant memoir, Lowery’s conversational voice effectively relates her experiences in the civil rights movement on and before that march.

In 1965, Lynda Blackmon Lowery turned 15 during the three-day voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery.

Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom by Lynda Blackmon Lowery