By Laurie Halse Anderson
An enslaved thirteen-year-old in Revolutionary New York, spying for the Patriots, discovers that neither side intends to free her.
Isabel and her little sister Ruth were promised their freedom in their owner's will. The will is ignored, and the two of them are sold instead to the Locktons, a wealthy Loyalist couple in New York, in 1776. A Patriot approaches Isabel: spy on the Locktons, and there might be freedom in it. So she does. She carries what she hears across the city while the war closes in around it, and every adult she trusts turns out to want something from her that isn't her freedom. Madam Lockton sells Ruth away. Isabel is branded on the face for insolence. And the Patriots she risked everything for shrug. It's told in Isabel's own voice, chapter by chapter, each one headed with a real quote from 1776, and it does not let go.
This is the summit of the unit and the book the other six are arranged around, because it asks the question none of them can: whose revolution? Isabel is standing in the middle of a war about liberty, owned. Every speech about tyranny lands on her differently, and Anderson never once has to point that out; she just puts the words in the same room as the chains and lets your child do it. It works because Isabel is furious rather than pitiable. She is sharp, watchful, funny, and she keeps her own counsel, and a child follows her because they want her to win, not because they're being taught something. The chapter-head quotes from real 1776 documents do quiet devastating work: the words are all there in the record, they were just never meant for her.