WHICH WAY FREEDOM? and OUT FROM THIS...

WHICH WAY FREEDOM? and OUT FROM THIS PLACE by Joyce Hansen (Avon Camelot: $2.99 each). These linked juvenile novels focus on two young slaves in South Carolina during the Civil War. Born into slavery, Obi and Easter have never known freedom until the war disrupts their settled, harsh lives and offers them a chance to escape. As a teen-age field hand, Obi is developing a sense of his identity as a man just as he’s becoming an extremely valuable piece of property to his masters; the younger, more vulnerable Easter is a deft house servant. After running away to avoid being sold, Obi joins the 25th Corps of Union Army and serves at Fort Pillow in Tennessee, while Easter joins a group of ex-slaves working to establish their own community on an old plantation in the Sea Islands. Hansen manages to inform her readers about the injustices of slavery and the early Reconstruction Era without ever becoming didactic or preachy. These carefully researched and well-written stories offer exciting reading for adolescents of all ethnic backgrounds.