M. C. Higgins, the Great - Hardcover

Hamilton, Virginia

3.44

4,284 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0027424804 ISBN 13: 9780027424805

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, 1974

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As a slag heap, the result of strip mining, creeps closer to his house in the Ohio hills, fifteen-year-old M. C. is torn between trying to get his family away and fighting for the home they love.

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Review:

From a perch on his 40-foot pole (a gift from his father for swimming across the Ohio River), M.C. likes to slide his hand over the rolling mountains, smooth out the sky, and fluff up the trees to the south of Sarah's Mountain. To the north, though, no amount of pretending can make the whine of bulldozers and deep gashes in the mountain disappear. Ever since M.C.'s great-grandmother Sarah came here as a runaway slave, Sarah's Mountain has been home to the Higgins family. But now their home is threatened by the strip-mining that has left a giant slag heap perched precariously above their house. Will the two strangers who appear in the hills help M.C. save his family?

Reissued in celebration of its 25th anniversary, M.C. Higgins the Great has a power that runs deeper than the coal seam snaking through M.C.'s mountain. The intensity of family bonds, the depth of rural superstition, and the grim tragedy of environmental destruction weave together in a story that is as complex as it is beautiful. Not surprisingly, Virginia Hamilton, who has won every major award given to authors, received the Newbery Medal, the National Book Award, and the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for this excellent novel. (Ages 13 and older) --Emilie Coulter

About the Author:

Virginia Hamilton is easily the most distinguished literary voice writing for young readers today. Since the publication of her first novel, Zeely, she has won every major award given to authors. Her many, many citations include the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal and the 1995 Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, both given for her outstanding body of work. Besides receiving the National Book Award, the John Newbery Medal, and the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award, all for M.C. Higgins, the Great, she's won two additional Boston Globe/Horn Book Awards, three Boston Globe/Horn Book Honors, three Newbery Honors, three Coretta Scott King Awards, five Coretta Scott King Honors, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Regina Medal, the NAACP Image Award, and countless others. In 1984 the Virginia Hamilton Lecture in Children's Literature annual conference was established in her name at Kent State University, and in 1995 she became the first and only children's author to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

Like M.C., Ms. Hamilton was born in the town an ancestor (her grandfather, Levi Perry) escaped to from slavery. She still lives in that town, Yellow Springs, Ohio, with her husband, poet Arnold Adoff.

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