By Elisa Carbone
Jamestown from inside the fort, told by an eleven-year-old London thief who was sent to Virginia instead of the gallows. It's old, hard history, and it stands entirely on the English colonists' side of the wall.
Samuel Collier is caught stealing on the streets of London and counts himself lucky to land in an orphanage instead of on the gallows. From there he's handed to Captain John Smith as a servant and put aboard the Susan Constant, and in 1607 he steps off in Virginia expecting to find gold lying on the ground. Instead he gets three of the hardest years in the colony's history. The gentlemen of the Virginia Company won't dig, because digging is beneath their station, so the work of survival falls to everyone else. The fort goes up and then burns down. Men die of sickness faster than they can be buried, and Samuel helps bury them. Powhatan warriors attack, and a boy Samuel knows is killed. Over time Samuel learns the Algonquian language, spends stretches in Powhatan's own town, and meets a ten-year-old Pocahontas who tears through the fort at a run. He comes to see that Smith's careful dealings with Powhatan are the one thing keeping the colonists alive. Then Smith is badly hurt and sent back to England, and the winter the colonists called the Starving Time sets in — the season the title has been pointing at all along. Carbone built the novel from Smith's own writings and other eyewitness accounts, and it reads that way.
It's a good match for a child who's decided history is just a list of dates. It moves fast, it carries a real body count, and it's narrated by a boy who's a thief and a liar in chapter one and has become useful by the end. What makes it work is that nearly all of it is documented: Samuel was real, Smith was real, and the refusal to dig and the burning fort and the Starving Time all happened. It also shows the colonists as they actually were, quarreling and unprepared and desperate and occasionally decent, rather than as heroes or villains. A child who reads two hundred and fifty pages of it stops seeing 1607 as a paragraph in a textbook and starts seeing people who couldn't get out.