It’s 1963 and Jez lives with her twin brother Jay, her mama, and her uncle Doc Buzzard. When Jezebel’s grandmother died, she couldn’t have imagined how it would upend her life. A smartly plotted dip into the Gullah-Geechee culture of early 60s rural South Carolina, it manages to weave family, history, and spooky stuff together like a braid. Root Magic by Eden Royce, isn’t really like anything else out there. The happy ending to this story is, as you might imagine, that I’ve found such a book. Still, you’d think that someone would be able to tap into that same link between history and chills that Ms. I manage to find it to varying degrees of success. For me, it was like a really good episode of The Bloodhound Gang, and I suppose there’s a part of me that’s always looking for that level of spookiness in the children’s books I read. What I particularly loved about it was how atmospheric it was. Today, kids would not be particularly shocked to encounter a book that combined the long arm of slavery to the present day alongside a ghost story/treasure ala Goonies, but in the 1980s it was a standalone in the field. I don’t think I really realized at the time what a novel thing it was. When I was a kid, one of my favorite novels was Virginia Hamilton’s The House of Dies Drear. Walden Pond Press (an imprint of Harper Collins)
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