Rating: WARTY!
If I had known that this was a Newbery honor book (1955) I never would have read it. I avoid honor and medal-winning books like the plague because in my experience, they're universally trashy. This one dates from 1954, when people were a lot more clueless than they are now. It's very short - only one CD, which is the best thing about, it since it really has nothing to offer.
The book blurb claims, rather dishonestly, that this is a "true story of Sarah's journey", but the truth is that only the barest facts are known: that Sarah and her father traveled to this locale to build a new home, and that Sarah was in the care of the native Americans for about three weeks. That's it! Everything else in this story is the purest fiction. Indeed, the journey is very short in the book. Nearly all of the story is about events taking place at the destination, not about the journey at all.
No one knows why Sarah went or what exactly, she did. They sure as hell don't have a clue what she said or thought, or how she interacted with her father or with the locals. They have no idea what Mrs Robinson or her kids actually said. All we have is Alice Dalgliesh's very creative and very dated fiction, colored by the 1950s and by Dalgliesh's religious faith, not by the early eighteenth century and anything which happened in reality.
The locals were the Schaghticoke, whom Sarah and her father met after they had made the fifty mile journey. Not far by our standards, but a week-long journey by theirs, taken on foot. I find it extremely hard to believe that she knew so little about these people before she got there. The very fact that her father leaves her in the care of the locals shows that he obviously knew they were no danger at all. Courage doesn't enter into it, and whatever strength this girl showed here was no greater than scores of other children have exhibited. Even surviving getting lost in the store or in the mall takes courage. This was no different from that that, and Sarah Noble's "courage" was of no greater order than this. The reason given in this work of fiction for her father's leaving her with the locals is laughable: that it was a long journey? It was exactly the same journey she'd just made, so this is purest bullshit and poor writing.
They saddest thing about the arrival of the Nobles was that they pretty much stamped their colonial imprint on the place the moment they arrived. The place was originally named something beautiful like Weantinogue. Now it's the pedestrian and mundane 'New Milford'. The river, at least, still retains some majesty. It's unnamed in the book, but is now known as the Housatonic, which is indeed a welcome tonic, but there was no attempt made to understand the locals or their culture. Their very names were changed to suit the colonials. Given that native American names tended to change with maturity, behaviors, and endeavors, perhaps this wasn't quite the nuisance or pain to them that we perceive it to be today, but it's still immensely disrespectful to simply change someone's name because their actual name is "too hard".
That said, I've seen some rather blinkered reviews which take this novel to task for what they describe as racism. I'm sorry, but they simply don't get it. This novel depicts a young girl's views, not the author's, and not any politically correct or incorrect agenda. Depicting a young girl as seeing native Americans for the first time, and observing that they are brown, and observing that they "talk funny" or that they don't speak English has nothing to do with being racist. It has to do with accurately describing how the girl might have really felt back then. Depicting her playing with the children, even riding on the back of one of them isn't enslaving the natives or demeaning them. It's depicting what might well have happened. A native American can't carry a white kid on his back across a river - by his own choice - without being subjugated?! Nonsense! I think observations of that nature about this book are lamentably short sighted and biased.
The biggest problem for me with this novel is that it tells us nothing which we cannot more ably learn from better books. Alice Dalgliesh is not by any means an expert on colonial life, or on the Schaghticoke, and this novel, commendably enlightened as it is for the time it was written, once again goes only to prove what a colossal waste of time it is reading Newbery medal winners. I dis-recommend this book for these reasons, but primarily for it being pure fiction masquerading as fact.
