An Actual Report of a Book – Look to the Hills

Look to the Hills: The Diary of Lozette Moreau, a French Slave Girl (Dear America series) By: Patricia C. McKissack
Fiction: history, 183 pages, 6th grade reading level, copyright 2004

OK, if you haven’t heard about the Dear America series it is much like the American Girls books only for older kids and both girls and boys. There are fictionalized diaries; letters etc. that let you look into life of children at a set time in American history. This one is about the year 1763 in New York. It was an interesting book, due to the choice of narrators. As the title states it is the writings of a French slave, as you learn in the book this is just after the French have lost the French and Indian war in America. Also, as a literate slave who worked as a companion to a French girl she had more education and culture then most of the free white Englishmen that she was surrounded with at the fort she was living next to. This lead to her doing things that the average slave did not do, but for the most part it was things that were true to the time period. For example, as she could not cook, clean, do farm work, or sew at the start of the book so, her owner hired her out to help a store owner with his book work, on the side she was allowed to get odd jobs on her own for food or money and so she wrote and read letters for the soldiers. Like most children’s books of historic fiction it does have a few downsides that writer’s of children’s book feel that they need to do. Mainly, the need to add a happy ending no matter how unlikely. In almost all children’s books on slaves the slaves either are freed by their masters or are able to escape, once free they are never captured and end up living happy and prosperous lives as well liked pillars of the community (community either meaning a some what realistic, members of the area that are freemen and slaves, or the more used, every one that knew them no matter what the color of their skin or earlier held views on slavery.) But over all it was a good read which was well researched.