Melitte

In 1772, years of mistreatment force thirteen-year-old Melitte to decide whether or not to run away from the Frenchman who has kept her as a slave on his poor Louisiana farm

Grade 4-8. Shaik explores the psychological effects of slavery in this novel set in Louisiana in the 1760s and 1770s. At the age of six, Melitte can not remember ever having a loving touch?only hard work, rags of clothing, scraps of food, and harsh words. She comes to understand that she is "owned" by a poor, hapless farmer and his cruel, selfish wife. Soon she adds child care to her never-ending chores and experiences love as she forms a sisterlike bond with her owners' baby girl. When their rough cabin burns down, Melitte and the Duroux family are forced to move onto a neighboring plantation where Melitte encounters others like herself and learns fully what it means to be enslaved. By the time she is 13, she realizes that her only hope for freedom is to escape. The emotional first-person narrative and well-researched historical detail paint a vivid picture of the times and provide a wrenching look at slave life. Shaik points out the dehumanizing effect of slavery on the slaveholder as well as on the enslaved as readers watch Melitte's owner (who in actuality is her father) become increasingly callous toward the girl, stealing the money she earned to purchase her freedom. In the hopeful ending, her loving half-sister helps her escape and Melitte arranges to be taken to a camp of runaways. Accessible and affecting historical fiction.?Eunice Weech, M. L. King Elementary School, Urbana, IL
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A novel set in Louisiana that spans the years 176572, when the colony was changing from French to Spanish rule. Narrated by Melitte, a young mulatto slave girl belonging to a feckless farmer and his sadistic wife, the story follows her from the age of six, when she is already working beyond her strength in field and cabin, to the age of thirteen, when, after an unsuccessful attempt to buy her freedom, she runs away. Shaik has vividly imagined the psychic pain of bondage as she traces both Melitte's gradually dawning awareness that her misery and lovelessness are caused by an evil named ``slavery'' and the concomitant growth of her fierce desire for freedom. In the end, Melitte must leave behind the one person she loves--Marie, the young daughter of her owners, who was entrusted to Melitte's care as an infant and who helps her escape. That Marie, the pampered young ``mistress,'' could be as daring and selfless as Shaik shows her at the tender age of six, strains credibility, but the growth of the bond between the girls is convincingly rendered. Full of period detail and vivid sensory writing, this book provides an aching answer to the question, ``What was it like to be a slave?'' (Fiction. 10-14) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.