Unfortunate Son, The by Constance Leeds

The Unfortunate Son
Constance Leeds
Viking Children's Books
302p.

Luc, a youth born with one ear and raised by a drunken father in fifteenth-century France, finds a better home with fisherman Pons, his sister Mattie, and their ward Beatrice, the daughter of a disgraced knight, and even after being kidnapped and sold into slavery in Africa, he remains remarkably fortunate.

Never Forgotten by Patricia McKissack

Never Forgotten by Patricia McKissack
Schwartz and Wade
2011
Unpaged

In eighteenth-century West Africa, a boy raised by his blacksmith father and the Mother Elements--Wind, Fire, Water, and Earth--is captured and taken to America as a slave.

Jefferson's Sons by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

Jefferson's Sons: A Founding Father's Secret Children by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
Dial Books for Young Readers
2011
360p.

A fictionalized look at the last twenty years of Thomas Jefferson's life at Monticello through the eyes of three of his slaves, two of whom were his sons by his slave, Sally Hemings.

Freedom Stone by Jeffrey Kluger

Freedom Stone by Jeffrey Kluger
Philomel Books
2011
316p

With the help of a magical stone from Africa, a thirteen-year-old slave travels to the battle of Vicksburg to clear her father's name and free her family from bondage.

Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, and Science, by Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos

Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, and Science,  by Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos

Clarion Books
2010
                         166 p.


Summary:  This meticulously researched, brutally honest, compelling book offers readers a different way to look at many events over the past 200 years or so. The title says it all. From the slave trade through abolition; from revolutions (American, French, and Haitian) to the Louisiana Purchase; from the decline of honey to the rise of saccharine, these events and many more are directly traced to the cultivation and production of sugar cane around the world. With a focus on slavery, Aronson and Budhos demonstrate how this one crop, with its unique harvesting needs, helped to bring about a particularly brutal incarnation of slavery. What makes this such a captivating read is that the book has a jigsaw-puzzle feel as the authors connect seemingly disparate threads and bring readers to the larger picture by highlighting the smaller details hidden within.  (School Library Journal)