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The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party.

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The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party written by M. T. Anderson, published by Candlewick Press What if your whole life were someone's science experiment--an experiment skewed against you? Octavian, a young black boy, lives in a household of rationalist philosophers in 1760s Boston. He does not realize that his life is unusual, that most black boys do not learn Latin and Greek, dress in silks, or have their excrement weighed daily. Octavian is part of an experiment to determine whether blacks are of a different species. As the American Revolution looms, Octavian brutally learns the shocking truth. M. T. Anderson's beautifully written and elegantly structured novel immerses readers in the period using traditional eighteenth-century language that resonates with the timeless struggle of being young in a cruel and unjust world. This brilliant and horrifying tale underlines the fact that within every well-known story there are others to be told.

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I WOULD LIKE to speak of reading and of the town where I grew up; I would like to speak of Stow, Massachusetts, some forty miles from here, as it was in the glorious year 1976.

In that bicentennial year, our town was still rural, and in the center stood the white-steepled church and the Richardsonian library, which was brick and quaintly turreted. Down the road our town had, of course, its haunted house, its Puritan graves, its ice-cream stand, and its bad girl. It had its pumpkins and its squash. At crossroads marked with stone in Stow, in Sudbury, in Concord, in Acton, stood crumbling nineteenth-century houses in which lived crumbling nineteenth-century couples, born in the reign of Queen Victoria, and now, in the reign of disco, clipping flowers sweetly about the green. Several of the farms were farms, and through the woods ran stone walls behind which one might crouch, present, and fire. The autumn air smelled of Concord grapes and windfall apples turned to vinegar. There were great stretches of woodland. From the lake, one could walk for several hours through forest and emerge in the town center, behind the Buick salesman. I recall that the grocery store, in that time, was called Purity Supreme, and as we walked its aisles, we heard voices in the air that spoke of Joy, of Cheer,...

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