Don Quixote charges at the windmill, raging at the fact that people don’t read enough. “This is actually good”, said a ninth-grade student of mine today as they were thinking about the two-page article they’d read. Granted, I had just spoken to them about their less-than-stellar grades and they were probably trying to placate me, but I’ll take it as a win. This all leads to Rebellion 1776. This is historical fiction that cooks at a slow boil, but is bubbling over the sides of the pot before you realize it.
There are moments in Rebellion 1776 that had me checking online searches to confirm things happening in the story.” I didn’t know that”, I said to my wife when I realized that Smallpox was reaching its peak at the same time as America’s independence from Great Britain. “Oh yeah”, she chimed in as if she’d been watching Grey’s Anatomy: The Revolutionary Years on Hulu. When the United States of America was just about to break the umbilical cord, it was being chased by a highly contagious disease whose puss-filled bulbs either blinded, disfigured or was the leading killer of humans for 180 years. And in 1776, this disease had its sights set on the northeast United States.
Smallpox is not a main character in Rebellion 1776. It does impact the main characters, and is constantly bubbling below the surface, but rarely takes center stage. However, when it does become the focal point the book crystallizes in a way that will have mglit audiences reading each word with age-appropriate disgust, curiosity and an appreciation for vaccines and modern medicine.
Come for the story about the girl who is looking for her father as the Revolutionary War is taking shape, and stay for the gross-out descriptions of smallpox. In a way that’s correct. If you try to tell a group of middle or high school readers to sit back and dig into this great book about a teenage girl’s work as a nanny in 1776, you’ll be greeted with blank stares by most of them. It’s quite challenging to get school-age children to read, regardless of how interesting the book is.
However, much like water will find its level, Rebellion 1776 will find its people. It’ a very well-paced book that does a great job of alluding to desert, while making you eat your surprisingly delicious vegetables first. You think you don’t want to read about a teenage girl working as a housekeeper, but you’re intrigued by her search for her father, so you keep on reading.
Sure a part of you doesn’t care about reuniting the family, for you, it’s the history that keeps you locked in. Rebellion 1776 is a detail-rich story about Boston in 1776. There’s a fun map of Boston at that time on one of the first pages to draw you in, just in case you weren’t sure about this whole ‘rebellion’ thing. You are reading the book from your living room or the softness of something modern creature comfort, but you’ll swear that you can smell the filth coming from the dock workers. That dark spot on your carpet has always been there and is most certainly not from the surly thief who is trying to blackmail Elsbeth Culpepper. The bump on your arm is just a spider bite, reminding you that the sheets need to be cleaned. It is not smallpox, that’s a disease that’s been eradicated, #GoScience.
Rebellion 1776 is disarming historical fiction that manages to make people who otherwise wouldn’t read it somehow stumble into its orbit. The chapters are around nine pages, the perfect length for those middle or high school readers who are looking for an out. “If this chapter lets its foot off of the gas or otherwise starts to suck, I’m out of here”, those reluctant readers will say. They might be secretly disappointed that it won’t and doesn’t because the chapters maintain their tension. It’s a curious page-turner for ages 10 and up due to the fact that it’s historical. The enjoyment that young readers will have is in the details. Those subtle details that ELA teachers across the land have been trying to teach them will come roaring back to them in Rebellion 1776. When they read the pages and wonder why they can’t stop, they might not thank their ELA teacher, or realize why they keep reading, but that’s the magic of jumping into a good book.
Rebellion 1776 is by Laurie Halse Anderson and is available on Caitlyn Dlough Books, an imprint of Atheneum Books for Young Readers.
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