The land is all-important to the Logan family. But it takes awhile for Cassie and her three brothers to understand just how lucky they are to have it. They must learn the hard way that having a place they can call their own in rural Mississippi permits the Logans the luxuries of pride and courage that their poor black sharecropper neighbors can't afford.
Having land gives the Logan children an emotional foundation as they begin to notice the difference between how white children and black children are treated in the Jim Crow South of the Great Depression. Like how textbooks are only issued to black children - labeled "nigra" in the book's inside cover - after they've been thoroughly used by white children. And it takes injustices such as these, and a turbulent year of intense racial prejudice, of night riders and burnings, to show Cassie just how important owning their own land is.
Winner of the 1977 Newbery Medal and nominated for the National Book Award, the story of Cassie Logan, an independent girl growing up relatively protected in a loving family, is culled from author Mildred Taylor's own family's life. It not only stands as an important addition to the cumulative record of the African-American experience, but crafted with astonishing verisimilitude, it stands as an important contribution to young adult literature as well.
BIO
Mildred D. Taylor is the author of nine novels including The Road to Memphis, Let the Circle Be Unbroken, The Land, and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Her books have won numerous awards, among them a Newbery Medal (for Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry), four Coretta Scott King Awards, and a Boston Globe—Horn Book Award. Her book The Land was awarded the L.A. Times Book Prize and the PEN Award for Children’s Literature. In 2003, Ms. Taylor was named the First Laureate of the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature. Mildred Taylor was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and grew up in Toledo, Ohio. After graduating from the University of Toledo, she served in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia for two years and then spent the next year traveling throughout the United States, working and recruiting for the Peace Corps. At the University of Colorado’s School of Journalism, she helped created a Black Studies program and taught in the program for two years. Ms. Taylor has worked as a proofreader-editor and as program coordinator for an international house and a community free school. She now devotes her time to her family, writing, and what she terms “the family ranch” in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
REVIEWS
"The vivid story of a black family whose warm ties to each other and their land give them strength to defy rural Southern racism during the Depression. . . . Entirely through its own internal development, the novel shows the rich inner rewards of black pride, love, and independence despite the certainty of outer defeat.” -- Booklist (starred review)
“The strong, clear-headed Logan family . . . are drawn with quiet affection and their actions tempered with a keen sense of human fallibility.” -- Kirkus Reviews
“The events and setting of the powerful novel are presented with such verisimilitude and the characters are so carefully drawn that one might assume the book to be autobiographical, if the author were not so young.” -- The Horn Book
[P] Puffin Books / November 27, 2001
0.8" H x 7.6" L x 5.0" W (0.5 lbs) 304 pages