The Secret to Freedom - Hardcover

Marcia Vaughan is an award-winning author of numerous books for children, including Snap!, a Junior Library Guild Selection, Whistling Dixie, an ALA Notable book, and The Secret to Freedom, a Teachers' Choices Award winner published by LEE & LOW BOOKS. A full-time author, Vaughan is a popular speaker at national and regional conferences. She lives in Vashon Island, Washington, with her husband and their son.

Larry Johnson is a fine artist who has illustrated several children's books, including Knoxville, Tennessee by Nikki Giovanni, When Joe Louis Won the Title, and LEE & LOW's The Secret to Freedom, praised by SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL for its "expressive acrylic paintings . . . rich in color and emotion.". He also serves as a Youth Minister at a Baptist church and is cohost of a weekend sports radio show. Johnson and his wife live in Stoughton, Massachusetts.

Ages 5-8. A young girl listens to her Great-Aunt Lucy tell stories of life during slavery: Lucy's brother Albert becomes a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and Lucy assists him. Beaten by his suspicious owners, Albert reluctantly leaves his lame sister, and Lucy never knows if he has made it North. The Civil War ends, but Lucy isn't completely happy until many years later when she receives a message from Albert, alive and well in Canada. Part of that message is a small quilted square, a remembrance of the story's centerpiece, the sack of quilts that Albert brings to Lucy during their slave days. Each quilt pattern, designed with a secret code, gave information to slaves as they made their escape on the Underground Railroad. Although these signals are decoded in the text and more fully in an afterword, it's not always clear just how the pattern directed the runaways. A jarring note comes in the book's second spread when Great-Aunt Lucy says, "When I was about your age, I was a slave." Up until then, the story has seemed contemporary. On the plus side, the quilts-as-signals element is a fascinating sidelight to the history of the Underground Railroad, and the acrylic paintings, filled with both drama and warmth, speak of families, present and past. Ilene Cooper
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