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The Freedom of Jenny

by Julie Burtinshaw

Writers of historical novels need to maintain a delicate balance between history and telling good stories. The Freedom of Jenny, by Vancouver’s Julie Burtinshaw (Dead Reckoning and Adrift), doesn’t always keep this balance, though it does important work in bringing to light a little-known chapter of Canadian history.

The novel, for readers aged 11 to 14, follows the Estes clan, a family of slaves who buy their freedom and move to California during the Gold Rush. After the mother dies, and in the face of growing racial tension in the state, they move north, eventually settling on Salt Spring Island. Jenny is the family’s oldest surviving daughter, a capable and hardy girl who can read and write. By the novel’s end, she’s a newlywed with a baby on the way, living close to her remaining family members and cautiously enjoying an always tenuous freedom.

While the novel describes a historically interesting period, it seems unsure of its footing, restlessly shifting between educating and entertaining readers, and ultimately failing to create a compelling storyline. Dictionary definitions and epigraphs head each chapter, and while these certainly help introduce new terminology (for example, “emancipate” and “Crown colony”), they quickly become obtrusively pedantic. Similarly, the overload of historical detail, such as acts of government and legal cases, demonstrates Burtinshaw’s extensive research but crowds out the characters, who remain one-dimensional and too often seem only mouthpieces for history lessons. The plot, too, struggles to overcome its historical genesis, and plods through a series of terrible misfortunes before petering out with little sense of climax.

Jenny and the history she represents are certainly shocking and worth reading about, but in this incarnation they don’t combine for successful fiction.

 

Reviewer: Laurie McNeill

Publisher: Raincoast Books

DETAILS

Price: $12.95

Page Count: 200 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-55192-839-6

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 2005-11

Categories:

Age Range: 11-14