By Christopher Paul Curtis
The first child born free in a Canadian settlement of formerly enslaved people finally sees, with his own eyes, what everyone around him had escaped.
Eleven-year-old Elijah is the first baby born free in Buxton, a real settlement in Canada founded by people who escaped slavery, and he's just as famous for once throwing up on the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass. He's honest to a fault, easily spooked, and funny, and for most of the book his troubles stay small and comic. Then a con man steals the money a neighbor had saved to buy his own family out of slavery, and Elijah slips across the border into America to help get it back. There he sees, for the first time, what everyone in Buxton had lived through. He comes home carrying a baby to freedom, and he comes home changed.
This is the longest read on the trail, and it earns every page. Curtis comes at slavery from an unusual angle — through a child who has only ever been free, meeting it secondhand for the first time — so students feel the shock through fresh eyes instead of going numb to it. He builds real trust with humor first, which is why the ending hits as hard as it does. It won a Newbery Honor and the Coretta Scott King Award, and it holds up as a whole-class novel for the oldest readers in the unit.