By Ann Turner
The Revolution from inside a Loyalist house, told by the girl hiding in the trunk while her neighbors ransack it.
Katie's family are Tories. They're loyal to the King, and that means the people they've always known, the families they've picnicked with, have stopped speaking to them. Then the rebels come for the house. Katie's family runs for the woods, but Katie is angry and she won't go; she darts back inside, and when the men burst through the door she climbs into her mother's blue wool trunk and pulls the lid down. She lies there in the dark listening to her neighbors break her home apart. And then a bayonet comes through into the trunk, and a man lifts the lid, and looks straight at her, and closes it again without a word. It's based on a real family, Ann Turner's own ancestors.
This is the Loyalist book, and there is nothing else on the shelf that does its job. Every child in the unit will spend weeks being asked to identify with the Patriots; this one puts them in a trunk while the Patriots are the ones smashing the furniture, and it does it in thirty-two pages without ever arguing a case. It works because it isn't a lecture, it's a scare. A child holds their breath with Katie and only afterwards notices whose side they were rooting for. Himler's washy, dim watercolors keep the whole thing at dusk, and the moment the man closes the lid is one of the great wordless kindnesses in a picture book, because he was her neighbor too, and something in him wouldn't do it.