Tonya Bolden

If you come across this young adult historical fiction novel about Savannah, I recommend you read her mother's story first in Inventing Victoria. While Savannah's story is the better-written novel of the two in my view, there's a key aspect of it that packed a stronger punch for me because I'd read about her mother first.

Both novels are written in an often fragmented style that I think could have made them good novels-in-verse if they'd been more lyrical. But I picked up each of these books not for the writing style but for the same reason regarding their content.

Both books feature Black American heroines and highlight aspects of Black American history that aren't as well-known or talked about as much as slavery, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s.

And the more Savannah learned along her journey, the more determined she became, the more inspired I became by the read.

As with the novel that precedes it, reading the ending Author's Note after finishing the story is a must.… (mere)

This book was published in 2008 but looks like it was published earlier because it is profusely illustrated with fascinating reproductions of contemporary photographs. One of the extraordinary things about Carver's life was that he was born during the American Civil War (which would be better called something like the "War of the Southern Secession") and lived to be old enough to meet Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At the Tuskegee Institute, we see some very dapper young gentleman in a cutaway coat studying a cow skeleton, and then Carver as a much older man in more casual check trousers and a looser and less formal jacket. Carver is much like Nikola Tesla with his mustache and his intense passion about his chosen field of study, but less glamorous to posterity because electricity is more exciting to moderns than botany. In the best late Victorian tradition, he was also an outstanding painter of his beloved plants; there are similarities here with, e.g., the life of Beatrix Potter, who made her start as a technical illustrator. The photograph of Carver's personal microscope, which is beautiful, is from the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site.

(Carver could be pretty dry about his association in the public mind with peanuts and nothing but peanuts.)… (mere)