The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman

The Freedom Maze Reviews

• 
  Lata

  This was my first book by Delia Sherman, and it was a very pleasant surprise to find out that this audio version was narrated by Robin Miles, whose lovely voice I'd recently heard narrating two other books:
  Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race and
  Another Brooklyn.)
  
  About The Freedom Maze: Sophie is thirteen years old and on her way to the family's country property (former plantation) outside New Orleans. Sophie's feeling resentful and frustrated about having to spend the summer in the country; her mother is leaving her there with her aunt so her mother can get a job as a CPA. Sophie's mother is angry, thanks to a fairly recent divorce, while Sophie seems to have more ambivalent feelings about her father's leaving.
  It's the summer of 1960, and Sophie's mother is planning on sending Sophie to Catholic private school in the fall to avoid having to send her girl to a desegregated public school.
  Sophie is left to her own devices after her mother leaves, and wanders the property, reading and exploring. She eventually encounters a strange creature, who ends up propelling Sophie into the past on the plantation. Sophie is seen as the mixed race offspring of the brother of the owner, and is taken on as a house slave. Sophie has had very little contact with any African Americans over her thirteen years, except for her mother's housekeeper, and doesn't really understand any of her family's past as plantation owners.
  The bulk of this story is Sophie's experiences on the plantation. This family of slave owners isn't as horrible as some I've read about, and this is a YA book, so Sophie's time as a slave was less terrible than I expected it to be. However, she does get to experience some of the dehumanizing and humiliating aspects of slavery, and grows a lot over the time she spends in the past, beginning to question many of her assumptions about her place in the world, and how people different from her should be treated.
  One thing I really liked about how time travel was handled; there wasn't just a big reset button on the whole experience. Sophie was 13 at the beginning of the story, and had undergone physical changes thanks to puberty while in the past. These changes were still there when she was returned to the present.
  (This was a 2011 nominee for the James Tiptree Jr. Award and a 2012 Andre Norton Award winner.)
• 
  Tamora Pierce

  In 1960 Sophie's wish unexpectedly results in her trip back in time to her family's plantation in 1860. Tanned dark by the summer sun, Sophie is mistaken for one of her family's mixed-blood children and put to work as a slave, first in the moderately gentler "Big House," then as a more harshly used kitchen and field hand. This is a riveting, edge-of-the-seat story to read. Sophie finds even the supposedly easier life of waiting on the old mistress far harder than she is used to, with random blows and punishments falling on her and on the slaves she lives with. The beatings, starvation, injustice, cruel accidents, and death that are the common lot of a plantation slave come closer and closer to her until they catch her up. How will she get home at this rate--even if she can remember what her true home is?
  
  If you're one of those who judges a book by its cover, don't. This is a bit old-fashioned--in fact, it looks very much like the books I was reading in the 1960s, when civil rights, not a forced stay on a slave plantation, got white people to see what it was like to be a black person desiring freedom. The fact that the possibility of black bloodlines helped to create the dark tan that leads Sophie to be mistaken for a master's half white slave child lends bitter irony to Sophie's new life, since she is the descendant of the plantation owners. And the danger all around her kept me up reading until I finished the book. Delia Sherman is a brilliant writer, and this book is the most recent proof of that.
• 
  Sherwood Smith

  Verisimilitude—authenticity—authority. Plausibility and credibility. Truth.
  
  So much is written about the books in whose fictions we find truth so strongly that we willingly not only suspend belief, but tuck the fiction away among our own life memories.
  
  So much has been written on how and why it happens, and here I go, adding to the flow. What makes a book real? Injecting realism is the first answer, but that wasn’t satisfactory for all. Back in 1750, Samuel Johnson ranted about how it wasn’t useful or appropriate for the writer to imitate actuality.
  
  And that’s been a sticking point ever since, in books and film. I lose interest fast in a fictive piece that plods in a semblance of realtime, including each bite chewed and swallowed, every visit to the rest room, the process of choosing and donning clothing, the hunt for the car keys. I think the realistic detail that makes the scene resonate with experience is important, but as important is constructing convincing states of mind behind behaviors. I say that, but I’m aware that many readers won’t recognize certain states of mind—they haven’t the experience—and others won’t care about the circumstances of those states of mind.
  
  Over the decades I’ve seen critics, social scientists, and psychologists who do literary studies write variations on the fact that the fiction that sticks is about conflict between humans—the quest for dominance, whether it’s political, social, psychological, or sexual.
  
  I’m not willing to buy that as the primary goal—I know that I read for a lot of reasons, including discovery, the sense of the sublime, laughter, and imagining experiences that I could never have, and which do not include dominating my fellow being.
  
  But I do think that most of us desire the snap of the real; we read things we would like to experience, but also things we do not want to experience. In both situations, we have to be convinced for the length of the tale that it is real, and how much of our reading experience is heightened by the knowledge that the author might have some kind of associated experience?
  
  We bring to any book not only our critical faculties, but our experience. A book set in Los Angeles that has a high speed car chase down the 405 late in the afternoon is going to make me laugh, and toss me out of the story, whereas a reader who has never experienced L.A. traffic is going to be gripped by the chase’s verisimilitude. Some readers will be brought to the book by the fact that the writer was a highway patrol officer who one presumes had plenty of real life experience of high speed chases.
  
  That brings me to The Freedom Maze. The book’s sense of verisimilitude gripped me by the chitlins. How much authority do I have? I remember being a junior high student, I remember life in 1960, I read the same books Sophie did (and reacted the same way), but I have never been to New Orleans, nor have I heard the various dialects that have developed there. I’ve read some history about that region, but not to the extent that I’ve studied, say, Western Europe during the 17th Century. I do not have ancestors who lived in the south.
  
  Since the book just came out, I’m trying to avoid spoiling it, but what grabbed me from the beginning was the way that junior-high aged Sophie Martineau was drawn into her time travel adventure: she found herself betrayed by two important elements in her life, her reading, and her identity.
  
  Sophie’s parents broke up, and in 1960, when that happened, kids stayed with the mother pretty much all the time. But Sophie’s relationship with her mother is difficult. Like many women of the time, Sophie’s mother uses guilt and obligational gratitude as a means to control her child. Sophie’s solace has been books, especially fantasy.
  
  So when she is taken against her will to her grandmother’s dilapidated estate near New Orleans for the summer, Sophie makes an idle wish to a strange creature whom she assumes will behave like magical creatures do in fantasies . . . and instead of being propelled back in time as a daughter of the Fairchild estate, she is taken by the people as a runaway slave. Sophie is astonished. She’s white—she is a Fairchild! Well, yes, so to speak . . . everyone around her assumes that she’s a Fairchild because her father was attracted to female slaves. Which puts her very low on the social spectrum.
  
  Her first day—her first week—is just as hideous as you can imagine, but when Sophie’s had enough and makes her wish to go back, nothing happens. And won’t, until she fulfills her purpose. Which she is not told.
  
  The way that Sherman details Sophie’s life, the people she meets and develops relationships with, and the sometimes harrowing results, kept me reading far too long into the night, but what shifted the book from good to brilliant for me was the end. There were so many ways it could have gone, from the expected ending according to the old fantasies, to a more postmodern approach. Sophie’s adventure ends in a way that resonated for me with the history of those she’d come to identify with, with all the emotional fallout. There are consequences, from plot to emotional that Sherman takes the time to explore.
  
  I suppose there will be readers for whom this evocation of New Orleans in 1960 and in 1860 will not be convincing, and there will be readers who will look askance on anything written by a person who is not a descendant of slaves. I found it so compelling that I am still thinking over its issues of identify, including what is adulthood and what is childhood (and who decides it), two weeks later. The book was eighteen years in the making—I think it shows.
• 
  Carly Thompson

  Middle grade children's novel featuring time travel to the past. The book opens in New Orleans in 1960. The main character, Sophie, is 13 years old and adjusting to life after her parent's divorce. Her father has moved to NYC and her mother is now working and planning on returning to school (which she enjoys despite pretending that as a proper southern lady that she does not). Sophie's mother sends her to Oak River in rural Louisiana to stay at her family's run-down former plantation for part of the summer. While staying with her maternal grandmother and aunt, a magical creature transports Sophie into the past. She arrives in 1860 before the end of slavery to a bustling plantation run by slave labor. Sophie has developed a deep tan from being outdoors and her ancestors in the past mistake her for a light skinned slave. She is thought to be the illegitimate daughter of one of the adult sons who lives in New Orleans with his black mistress. Sophie is soon working as a slave on the plantation and learning the truth about slavery. She becomes friends with several of the slaves and even helps one woman escape to freedom in the North before being transported back to her own time period. What lessons does Sophie learn from her six months in the past (which appeared to only be 20 minutes in 1960)? She stands up to her domineering and somewhat cruel mother and decides to go and visit her father in New York City. Yes the lesson that Sophie learns from experiencing slavery is not to let her mother boss her around.
  
  I thought this was an interesting premise for a novel but the racial politics raised by the novel were problematic. The slaves and their struggles were in the plot to help Sophie achieve self-actualization. Sophie is instrumental in helping a slave escape from the plantation. Some of the black characters were too close to being stereotypes. I wonder how a black child would react to reading this novel; if Sophie had been black instead of white, this would have been a different and perhaps better novel.
  
  I listened to this on audio and found my attention wandering at times. Some of the supporting characters were not well distinguished and Sophie was a little too perfectly plucky for my tastes. I feel that there are better novels for children on slavery and better examples of time travel. On a side note, Kindred by Octavia Butler has moved up higher on my to be read pile.
• 
  Shawn Mooney (Shawn The Book Maniac)

  Bailed at the 30% mark - the time travel back to the days of slavery part of the story, which was going to take up the rest of the novel, rubbed me the wrong way. I felt it was sugar-coated and ineptly done. This year I've read two stunning novels about slavery: Octavia Butler's Kindred, and Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing. I have no desire to suffer through a bad one.
• 
  Elizabeth

  
  It’s 1960, and 13-year-old Sophie is doomed to a boring summer with her aunt and ill grandmother on the decaying remains of what was, 100 years ago, a bustling Louisiana sugar plantation. Through the strange machinations of a Brer Rabbit-type “Creature” (with clear parallels to the Natterjack of Edward Eager’s
  The Time Garden, Sophie’s preferred reading material), Sophie is plunged back in time to the plantation’s heyday. She’s a direct descendant of the plantation owners and is recognized as family: but not as legitimate family. Everyone assumes she’s the love-child of one of the tearaway sons and his mulatto mistress. Consequently she’s taken to be a light-skinned slave.
  
  Sophie starts out in a high position, as the personal maid to her great-great-etc. grandmother, but events (and the spoilt teenage plantation owner’s daughter) conspire to reduce Sophie’s circumstances little by little; so that by the end of the book she’s working in the grimmest situation possible, assisting with the dangerous, backbreaking and hellish work of the sugar refining factory.
  
  This is what timeslip novels were designed for - Edward Eager grown up: putting your protagonist through the wringer of her own ancestral past and having her come out a better person as a result. No, really a better person - a more capable, physically stronger, self-sufficient person in addition to learning some obvious lessons. One of the things that I loved about this book was the fact that Sophie changed physically as well as mentally - the changes were real, and VISIBLE. She returns from her six-month stint in 1860 taller, stronger, thinner, chestier, and a mature woman. She does not, like the Pevensie children, grow up and find herself back home a child again. What happens to her is real.
  
  Sophie’s decompression and re-entry into modern life was one of my favorite parts of the book. She is as shell-shocked as a concentration camp survivor (I confess this is where my own current research is focused, and the parallels were IN. MY. FACE); she is prepared to flaunt racial convention in a way that could be dangerous; she is ready for the Civil Rights Movement, which is about to begin in her own time. She's also is determined to find answers to some of the unresolved threads that her precipitous departure from 1860 left hanging. Her historical-society and museum excursions uncover a couple of hilariously ironic family bugaboos which Sophie wisely keeps to herself, but which the reader will hug to his or her heart.
  
  Another thing I loved about this book was its atmosphere - the strange presence of eerie religion, and the matter-of-fact reality of the plantation ghosts (one of which is plainly Sophie herself!) - the delicious mystery of a letter turning up from Sophie’s unwitting and pretended 1860-era “father” which seems to confirm her existence, referring to the gift of a dress for "his little girl."
  
  I’m not doing this book justice, because it’s even more complex than I’m making it out to be - there’s Sophie’s real family, which is falling apart, and there’s the volatile civil rights situation of the 1960s to take into account (Lousiana in 1860 vs Louisiana in 1960? *WOW*), and there’s the fact that every character in the book is complex and has good points and bad points, making almost everyone sympathetic or shockingly harsh depending on what’s going on. The research behind the book is phenomenal, but I only notice it as a writer, not a reader, because the reading experience is so enjoyable and effortless.
  
  I’ve heard a few people compare this book to Jane Yolen’s
  The Devil's Arithmetic, and that’s a very fair comparison in terms of structure - another book I deeply admire. But what these novels really have in common is the use of time travel as a means to deliver a crackling new perspective on difficult and sometimes appalling periods of history.
  
  
• 
  April Steenburgh

  Sophie is a young girl who can do nothing to fill the shoes her mother has set out for her. Not that the shoes are a particularly good fit, but Sophie bows her head and takes her mother's sharp comments in silence. When her mother has to move for schooling and work, Sophie spends a summer with her aunt and grandmother on what is left of the familial plantation in Louisiana. There she meets a mysterious, magical entity that sends her back in time. But Sophie quickly learns that adventure isn't as grand as books generally make it seem, and that family has as much to do with emotion and experience as blood.
  
  The Freedom Maze is an absolutely stunning book. I was honestly unable to pull myself away, needing to know how Sophie would survive her unexpected change in circumstance. Ms. Sherman obviously put an immense amount of time and love into researching for her story- the setting is heavy with life, the characters all effortlessly settle into a seamless whole. Unlike many books that deal with the issue of slavery in the South, The Freedom Maze is less concerned with the slavery itself, focusing instead on the people slavery made- how each side of the equation reacted and acted within the circumstance of their birth and skin color. Sophie is a unique entity, a young girl who when thrown into the past is mistaken for a mixed blood accident of an influential white male and a slave woman, not entirely because of her skin but because of her demeanor. She is so used to deferring to her mother it is impossible for her to pass as a young lady of proper birth in the past she finds herself in.
  
  The book is about watching Sophie grow aware of, and grow out of, her self-imposed slavery. It is a beautiful book, and one everyone would benefit from reading.
• 
  Jodi

  First of all, I love the cover of this YA book! Which is of course is why I picked it up in the first place. No teens in fancy ball gowns looking much older then their years, thankyouverymuch!
  The setting was delightful. How perfect to have a girl of the 1960s travel to the antebellum era and learn a thing or too about how it feels to be treated like less than a person because of the color of your skin. At first blush, it might seem just like another time traveling fantasy a la Edward Eager but there is more meat here than in your average magical children's book. There is reference to rape, a disturbing whipping scene, and other much more realistic experiences than you would expect. However, Sherman never crosses the line into darkness which maintains the feeling of a younger person's book.
  
  One reviewer complained about the excess of time spent in the 1960s, but of course for me, it was my favorite part. I thought there could have been MORE time spent there. There was a definite moral overtone but I never felt like it became overly preachy. Besides, though our country has come a long way towards eradicating racism, we aren't there yet and it is always good to be reminded (regardless of our race, color, or religion) that there is never a good reason to treat another person poorly.
• 
  Susan

  I picked up this book at the recommendation of the Slatebreakers blog (
  http://wp.me/p1DtDT-oH ). I agree with their review in that the time travel in which there is no magic fix for every problem and in which real change occurs in a character is quite compelling. I loved the beginning and end, the 1960s parts. A nice portrait of some conflicted family relationships. Bu I am troubled by the perspective here: a book about slavery and racism in the 60s all told from the point of view of a white girl. Do I think white characters can,t ever confront racism or think about race? Of course not. But something about the way the ending wrapped up so neatly made this narrative seem like it was looking at race to benefit the already privileged.
  
• 
  Nina

  Technically well-written, but with ultimately underlying flaws in the perspective that make this unrecommendable for me. I am never convinced that the main character is doing anything but "playing" at being a slave, and even as it gets more serious, the ending confirms this. She sure feels lucky not to be "mistaken" for a slave any longer, but she'll claim to walk in her ancestor's shoes.
  
  Also note the plentitude of blurbs...and then check acknowledgements to see how many are in her writing group. This feels shopped around, overly re-written without ever addressing the underlying problems.
• 
  Hylary Locsin

  Originally posted on my blog:
  http://libraryladyhylary.blogspot.com ! Check it out for more reviews!
  
  In 1960 New Orleans, thirteen-year-old Sophie Martineau is struggling to cope with her parents’ recent divorce. Her father has moved to New York City, and her former best friend is no longer allowed to socialize with the child of a single mother. To make matters worse, Sophie’s mother has decided to send her to Oak Cottage, an old plantation outside of New Orleans, to stay with her grandmother and aunt for the summer. Bored and lonely, Sophie makes a wish to be someone else, and is inadvertently transported back in time to 1860. Having spent several weeks in the sun exploring the bayou of Oak Cottage, Sophie’s tanned skin causes her to be mistaken for a slave, and she is immediately put to work in Oak River House, the luxurious home of her ancestors, the Fairchilds. Sophie is used to the racial segregation in the south of 1960, but nothing prepares her for the cruelty and discrimination she experiences as a slave in a pre-Civil War plantation.
  
  Inspired by real life slave narratives and memoirs, veteran author Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze proves to be a well-written and intriguing novel that is both entertaining and educational. Although the story involves time travel to the 19th century, it begins in the past, over fifty years ago, at the dawn of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Sophie is a complex character, as is her mother, a recently divorced, bitter woman who warns Sophie against associating with “negroes,” especially men. As was likely the case with many children during this period of time, Sophie is unsure of exactly why she is supposed to be afraid of African Americans, but takes her mother’s word for it, trying hard to be a proper southern lady. Sherman does an excellent job of conveying Sophie’s frustration, both with her parents’ divorce and her “exile” at the Oak River plantation. The story gets even more layered, however, after Sophie travels back to 1860. The many plantation slaves become to focus of Sophie’s new life, as do the ancestors she is forced to serve after they assume she is the light-skinned offspring of a relative and his servant. The author’s description of life on the plantation, from vocabulary to daily tasks, is very well done, and gives The Freedom Maze enough historical accuracy to have a strong place in the classroom. Overall, an exceptional novel that can easily be enjoyed by tweens, teens and adults, particularly those with an interest in American history.
  
  I am a big fan of both historical fiction and time travel, so this book was right up my alley. I thought the author did an outstanding job of describing the plantation and life as a slave in 1860. The reader is truly transported into this tumultuous period of time, something that I think would be very valuable for tween or teen readers who are learning about the Civil War or slavery. The author’s passion for this era, as well as slave narratives and memoirs, is very evident throughout the novel, and adds that much more to the already exceptional story.
• 
  Sarah

  When I read YA books, I do so with a lens of my own students (past, present, and future) and how I would use it or recommend it to independent readers. I chose this one because it was from a limited selection of age-appropriate fiction available on our MyON service, so I thought I might assign it to groups or even a whole class due to how easy it would be for us to access it. I regrettably even purchased two paper copies so I could mark it and use it for Distance Learning purposes. It took me, an adult avid reader, FOREVER to get through this book. The middle just lagged.
  
  To me, there was a definite undercurrent of racial bias in this book. Yes, the story was set in 1960 and 1860 in the South, so of course we are going to see horrible, racist actions and words from the characters, but there was a feeling of bias from the narrator as well. I would not have felt comfortable assigning or recommending this book to any children, and certainly not to Black children.
  
  I do feel that the author did a great deal of research in this book, and she mentions in her notes that she was inspired by an old advertisement for a missing slave who was blond and blue-eyed. Her story shines light on the issue that slaveowners fathered children whom they then enslaved, which is a part of history that I feel deserves to be examined, so I do give her a great deal of credit for that part of the telling.
  
  From the standpoint of young readers, I feel that having most of the slaves on this plantation named after countries and continents would be extremely confusing, especially to inexperienced readers. It creates a sort of blur where the characters run together.
  
  The book will teach its readers some of the horrors of slavery, but there are definitely other books that do this better.
• 
  Francesca Forrest

  This is a marvelous book that I highly recommend. In terms of format/genre, it's a fantasy story involving travel back in time (a type of story I adored as a kid), but it's much more than that. In 1960, thirteen-year-old Sophie has to go stay with her grandmother and aunt on the property that was once her ancestors' Louisiana plantation. She wishes to go back in time and have an adventure, and so she does--though not the one she expects to have: appearing in the past, she's assumed to be a slave. She has to learn how to survive as a slave--and not just any slave, but the illegitimate daughter of one of the white sons of the plantation, with all the complications that presents. Quickly she's wishing for her magic adventure to end, but it won't end until the creature who's brought her into the past decides she's fulfilled the purpose he's envisioned for her.
  
  All the characters are wonderful, most especially Sophie herself and the slave family she becomes closest to--with Canny, who's like a younger sister for her, and Antigua, who's like an older sister, and Africa, who is like a mother. Sophie's interaction with the white masters and mistresses of the plantation echo her interactions with her relatives in her present day (1960), giving an eerie feeling of past and present intermingling. There are harrowing experiences, and touching ones, and great bravery--and all of it impresses itself indelibly on the mind. It's a great book!
• 
  Rick O'Connor

  This is a thought-provoking book for middle school students (Grades 5-8). It touches on many different topics that would engage a class into deep discussion and reflection, such as divorce, slavery, human rights, time-travel, self-reflection, etc. The main character Sophie faces all of these topics in some form through the book and I think many students would relate directly to her encounters.
  
  In summary, Sophie ends up at her grandmother's house for the summer, and she is feeling less than good about herself, a large part of the reason being her parent's divorce, which was much more taboo than it is today (not that we should assume kids today can just "deal with it" any easier). Without giving too much away, she ends up getting the opportunity to time-travel, which could be looked at as her way to "escape" her current situation. Sounds good, right? Unfortunately for her, when she goes back in time, she is mistaken for a slave! . The feelings and emotions she experiences really give an insight to children and humans in general, and this would be good to ask kids how they empathize with her or people that have gone through what she is going through. Better yet, you could connect these struggles with struggles your students have experienced/are experiencing. This would get them more engaged with the text and more importantly really start thinking about issues that effect all humans and what we can do to be better people. There's a lot here to like!
• 
  Karen

  The 5th star is for the 2013-Audie-nominated audio production; the voice of Robin Miles swept me through time - first to 1960 and then to 1860 in this perfect-for-middle-school historical fantasy about a 13 year-old girl who meets a trickster creature, makes a wish for adventure, and finds herself 100 years in the past, enslaved on her family's sugar plantation in the Louisiana Bayou.
  
  (Never tell your wishes to tricksters - especially those you meet in a hidden garden in the center of a haunted maze in the Deep South... There's just no way it will turn out the way you think it will.)
  
  From the cheerful greens and yellows on the classic-looking cover, you'd never guess the gut-wrenching danger and terror ahead for Sophie who goes from reading Edward Eager in 1960 to a time-and-place where it would have been illegal for someone to teach her how to read at all - and what's worse, sickeningly legal for one person to own another. Oak River Plantation and the people who live there seem so real, it feels as if I went back-and-forth through time, too, and like Sophie, the journey has made more curious about the past and more observant in the present when it comes to human rights.
• 
  Stephanie A.

  A historical novel within a historical novel, time travel created by a twist of magic as a girl wishes she could have "an adventure" like the ones in her favorite books. Her granted wish drops her right into 1860, where her white but deeply tanned self is taken for a mixed-race slave, and allows us to experience the injustice of slavery even on a "nicer" plantation. Richly detailed and a very satisfying story, genuinely suitable for elementary age to adult. The fact that she goes back in time to the very property where she is currently staying, allowing her to see the familiar buildings and the garden maze in their heyday, is my favorite element.
• 
  Aaron

  An exciting, nuanced and thoughtful work. I loved it. Three things that bothered me, though:
  
  1) After returning to 1960, why did Sophie never bother to look inside the hiding place under the summerhouse to see if there was anything still there?
  
  2) At times the book comes too close to suggesting that Sophie's restrictive upbringing is comparable to slavery.
  
  3) Sophie's mother is a completely unsympathetic character (so is her father, but he never appears on-camera). The author provides some hints about how she got to be such an awful person and such a terrible parent, but never really allows us to sympathize with her or to see things from her perspective.
• 
  Kaion

  Too prudish for adult audiences, but probably also too old-fashioned for tweens/teenagers. There's something a little distasteful about the fact that it takes a six month trip into the Antebellum South and a stint as a field slave for Sophie to realize that the so-called "good ole' days" weren't so good if you weren't 1) white and 2) rich and 3) male, oh and black people are people too.
  
  In short: Stick with Kindred.
• 
  E.C.

  I feel like this book has always been around, perhaps a forgotten favorite from my childhood.
• 
  April Henry

  Thought provoking and well-researched. It's kind of a double time-travel story, because even the "current" portion of the story is set in 1960.
• 
  Suki

  It seems fitting that I finished reading The Freedom Maze on Juneteenth.
• 
  Shaz

  Three and a half stars
  
  Although this is written for a younger audience, it has excellent prose, is very well researched and just an immersive reading experience.
• 
  Mieneke

  As I had heard and read a lot of praise for Delia Sherman’s
  The Freedom Maze, I was excited to receive a review copy for the UK edition. And I was in no way disappointed by the story. The Freedom Maze was every bit as magical as I’d expected. This novel packs a lot in a slim package and I hope I can do it justice.
  
  Before talking about the obvious themes of the book and the historical settings, I want to examine its speculative elements. The Freedom Maze is a time travel story, but one powered by magic not technology. Time travellers are usually supposed to only observe, to prevent them from fundamentally changing things and creating a temporal paradox. Yet Sophie takes an active part in the past. She doesn’t cause earth-shattering changes to history, but the small-scale changes she effects, are profound for those they impact. Apart from the time travel element, there is another speculative element to the narrative. There are spirits included in the book: the trickster Creature, the loa Papa Legba, and the Orisha Yemaya. All three seem connected to religious beliefs of those brought to the Americas on slave ships. I say seem, because the true nature of Creature isn't truly revealed in the book. Their presence in the narrative isn't huge, especially that of Papa Legba and Yemaya, but it is key to the story.
  
  The two time lines both contain racial themes. Where in 1860 slavery has not yet been abolished, in Sophie's 1960 it may have been forbidden, but in general attitudes haven’t become much better in this later period. It is interesting to compare these eras' attitudes to today. We might like to think we’ve progressed beyond this, but there is
  plenty
  of
  evidence  that this isn’t true. As such, this book would make for a wonderful book to read together with your young teen. It provides a starting point to talk about the horrific practices of slavery and about racism, both past and present.
  
  The Freedom Maze tackles not just racism, but sexism as well. This is mostly addressed in the 1960s time line, where the changing mores of that time come into full play. Sophie's parents have been divorced and her mother has chosen to go to work, instead of finding a new husband to provide for her and Sophie. Her bid for financial independence is frowned upon by her elder female relatives and seems to equate to her being a loose woman with lax morals. There is a serious generational divide at play here – between Sophie's mum and her own mother, but between Sophie's mum and Sophie herself as well. Even if she's turning into a single, working mum, she still wants Sophie to be a well-mannered, perfect little lady, not the bookish, free spirit Sophie actually is.
  
  The characters are complex on both sides of the racial divide. In 1960, slavery may have been abolished, but Sophie's housekeeper is still black and her mother has warned away from black men because they are dangerous, not because men are dangerous, but because they are black. This attitude is re-enforced by Sophie's grandmother, who is an unlikeable old biddy and is very much racist. Yet Sophie herself sees things differently and her experiences in 1860 only solidify her conviction that all people should be treated equal. In the 1860 timeline, Sherman lets Sophie realise that even a benign master is still a master and no one should own another. Old Missy, into whose service Sophie is put as a lady's maid, has a kind heart, but ultimately still prefers to believe New Missy over Sophie, even when Sophie is telling the truth. Sherman shows that the life of a house slave may have been less physically taxing, it was still hard and dangerous and whatever form slavery takes, it is still abhorrent.
  
  The Freedom Maze was a wonderful book and I haven't even managed to touch on half of its talking points and exquisite characters. Suffice it to say, The Freedom Maze is a brilliant story in and of itself. It's a time travel adventure with a wonderfully impulsive protagonist in Sophie, who you can't help but fall in love with. However, I think The Freedom Maze is also a book that can serve as a wonder teaching aide and as such should be of interest to both teachers and school librarians.
  
  This book was provided for review by the
  publisher.
• 
  Heidi

  4.5 Stars
  
  The Freedom Maze is one of those beautifully crafted, almost underhanded coming of age stories where it’s impossible to observe the changes in one you see every day, until suddenly you’re faced with the contrast of who they once were. Sophie is a girl reaching most tentatively that border between being a child and being a young woman. Being pushed most forcibly toward the latter by her quite proper mother, Sophie feels stifled in her own skin (and especially the stockings, not to mention the bra). Wonderfully, it is Sophie’s refusal to release her grasp on the childhood notions of adventure and magic that eventually lead her into who she will become.
  
  Delia Sherman completely sucked me in with so many of those things I can’t resist–good historical fiction and good time travel among them. A relatively uncomplicated time travel tale, Sophie is thrown from her summer life at the family estate in Louisiana 1960 into life at the family estate (and plantation) in 1860. Both time periods were rife with struggles for Civil Rights; one for freedom, the other for equality. Because Sherman chose to focus the story on Sophie, a privileged white southerner of 1960 who is forced to become a light-skinned slave in 1860, we are afforded this window of opportunity to understand both worlds from an angle I, for one, have never seen. What I loved most about Sophie’s development was that her personal perspective on African Americans didn’t change so much as her understanding of them as human beings of equal (or greater) worth. She is a young person being brought up to have the perspective of her white southern family, never before realizing that as kind as they may seem, treating one with kindness is not the same as treating them as an equal. What changes are Sophie’s perspectives on freedom, respect, dignity, and family, and our understanding as readers of how complex this world and system has been throughout slavery, the Civil Rights movement, and today.
  
  Sophie longs for an adventure, and the creature who sends her back in time certainly gives her one, though not of the type any young person would request. Sophie is forced to redefine her world through the eyes of a slave, and in doing so learns what she is willing to stand up against, and what battles are not worth fighting. She comes into her own as a person and begins to define herself not by her name or her appearance, but by what she can do for those around her. The most striking and unique element of The Freedom Maze as a time travel story was Sophie’s gradual sinking into the past–her ability to adapt and acclimate directly related to her ability to remember the future and where she came from.
  
  The Freedom Maze is one of those books that is definitely enhanced by its audio production. The audio includes a wonderful interview with Delia Sherman in which she talks about the historical aspects of her book and the writing process, The Freedom Maze taking her a staggering 18 years and 27 rewrites to complete. She also talked of her role in finding the perfect narrator to portray Sophie’s tale, a process we as readers hear about very rarely (in fact, I’m not sure how much control authors usually have here). Sherman was immediately sold on Robin Miles for her ability to instinctively pronounce words like “New Orleans” as one from Louisiana would, and also Miles’ ability to capture two disparate historical time periods in her voice: 1960 and 1860. And she does; Robin Miles was without a doubt the perfect narrator for The Freedom Maze, easily transporting the reader to these time periods with her voice, accents, and inflection. My only confusion stemmed from the fact that Sherman refers to the “creature” in her interview as a male, but in the audio it is undoubtedly female. The fact is, the creature works well as a genderless character, but I’m now curious what pronouns were used in the physical book.
  
  The Freedom Maze is a phenomenal pick for all readers who enjoy the historical with a twist, particularly if you are a reader who enjoys introspection and quietly fearful plot lines. It will cause readers to really think about slavery in the history of this (or any) country, and how difficult arbitrary lines can become to draw over time.
  
  Original review posted at
  Bunbury in the Stacks.
• 
  Martin

  An excellent young adult novel, exceedingly well-written and researched. As a ‘through the looking glass’ experience, I found it so much more satisfying emotionally and intellectually than Colson Whitehead’s “Underground Railroad” which has been so popular this year. The book abounded with detail about slave life, barely watered down from the phenomenal non-fiction “The Half Has Never Been Told” by Edward E. Baptist. There are frequent references to calamities such as a master whipping a captured runaway “until the skin fell off his back, and then burned him to a crisp and threw his bones into the bayou.” The author attempts to convey the sensory experience of a slave cabin, with men too tired to keep their heads up, “walls covered with clothes and tools hung on hooks […] The air was still and hot, and thick with grease and sweat and small biting insects.” There are incidents such as select Bible passages read aloud that condone slavery, talk of the political unrest between the North and South, the owners’ humanely allowing children under 15 to work only one 8-hour shift instead of two (although they still had much to do back at the slave quarters such as gardening, cooking and cleaning), and talk of where slaves had originated prior to their current location. At one point Sophie is banished to the fields and wonders if, despite being popularly believed to be the progeny of the planter, anyone in the big house remembers she exists. I love that Sophie is white and is mistaken for black due to her hair and her tan. The author stated in an interview that during her 18 years of research she encountered several sales ads for slaves that note blonde hair and blue eyes, "could pass for white." The author stated that she loved this fact that the racial line between slave and white was not as clear cut as we typically think. I love the ‘eve of the Civil War’ setting, it gives a sense of hope and dread while allowing characters the chance to speak organically their views on slavery and the Union.
  
  Based on some of the reviews here on Goodreads, I couldn’t decide whether I should read this or not. I’m so glad I did. Some reviewers poo-poohed the conclusion, saying that Sophie left the experience with a better work ethic/ability to do chores. That, for me, was beside the point. She came back with a deep engagement with history, as one hopes young readers will also do. She realized, in her recognition that her grandmother was not all that different from the ladies of the big houses and that the traces of history are contained in mindsets, not in structures like the dilapidated cabins or abandoned manor houses. She also learned how to interact with authority in a way that could shield her from harm and keep her humanity intact, which is how black people then and now had/have to do to get by. She gained a double consciousness regarding white people, their possible duplicity and/or frailty, and their potential to do harm easily, sometimes unconsciously.
  
• 
  Wendy

  I really enjoyed this, and had not expected to. I didn't find the problems with a "white savior" complex that some of my literary acquaintances have. Every objection I try to bring up to myself... like, that the other slaves accepted Sophie and were awfully good to her for no real reason, when for most of the book she brings them nothing but trouble... I can find an immediate counterexample for, like all the scorn she is treated with for having no useful skills and getting special treatment because of her skin color/presumed parentage.
  
  That this book has the same plot and structure as The Devil's Arithmetic--that it is, in effect, The Devil's Arithmetic set on the old plantation--seems like it ought to bother me more than it does. I think that does suck some of the freshness out of this book, but overall, I don't find myself caring that much. My sister points out that there are several books similar to The Devil's Arithmetic now, but if I've read them, they haven't struck me the way this one did. It isn't derivative so much as it is formulaic, and I guess one bothers me more than the other.
  
  I don't know this book's publishing history, and I don't mean any offense to the people at the small publisher who brought this out, but I did wish it could have benefited from the more expensive packaging and perhaps a tighter/bolder/more experienced editing hand. I wonder whether this manuscript seemed too risky for the big publishing houses, and bless the small ones for publishing books like that. Considering some of the criticisms this book has generated, if that's what happened, the big houses were probably right to be skittish. But this book--with its faults--is definitely better than quite a lot of the other books I read from 2011, all brought out by big houses.
  
  Mostly, the book felt repetitive in places, like it could have been shorter; the conventions of the time travel needed to be either more fully sketched or more ambiguous, because what's left is just a little confusing, and I felt like I was missing something or ought to understand something I wasn't quite getting. The 1960 setting and characters bored me completely, and as with the time travel mechanism, I thought we needed either less or more of 1960. Perhaps if there was more, I would have cared about the characters and setting more. If there was less, on the other hand, I wouldn't find it so annoying.
  
  I liked the gentle blending of adolescence-onset with time travel--something that was also explored in The Devil's Arithmetic and Charlotte Sometimes, but less explicitly.
  
  All in all, a worthwhile read. I didn't even get into the intriguing details of the setting, the food and clothes and medicines of the slaves, all of which are given just the right amount of detail.
• 
  Miranda

  At some point during The Freedom Maze, I became so engrossed in the story that I didn't even want to pause to write down notes for a review later. Unfortunately this means that my review is probably going to be a little all over the place, but oh well.
  
  This is the third novel I've read about someone being sent back in time to the mid 19th century and being forced to be a part of the slave plantations. The first, of course, being Kindred, and the second being Zetta Elliott's A Wish After Midnight.
  
  The Freedom Maze has one very large difference, however: The main character who gets sent back, Sophie, is a young white girl. Due to a tan she gets while exploring the land around her aunt's house, she gets mistaken for a slave back in 1860. (This is one of the downfalls of the novel; at some point her tan should have faded enough that someone should have noticed past calling her high yellow. And did no one notice the tan lines her clothing would have left behind?)
  
  I don't want to spoil the novel, so suffice it to say that it's a very thoroughly researched exploration of slave life on a plantation. It could have run into some issues being a white girl put into a black person's place, but from my (admittedly white girl colored glasses) reading nothing screamed out as awful.
  
  The greatest strength in the novel, aside from the vibrancy (both good and bad) of the setting, are the characters. Sophie herself is a grand main character; spoiled but lonely and emotionally abused by her mother, curious and tired of trying to fit into an ideal of womanhood pushed on her by everyone. The bonds she forms with the other characters in 1860 moved me to tears, especially as her purpose for being sent back to 1860 becomes clear.
  
  The most interesting part is that eventually, Sophie even begins to forget where she originally came from. Her body and her mind have to be changed in order to survive in her new surroundings, and she slowly begins to believe the lies she's told everyone.
  
  Unfortunately this means that when she returns home, I felt the resolution to that was a little rushed. She has some problems readjusting, but it's not as drawn out as I would have preferred. And I also would have liked it if there had been some resolution between Sophie and her mother, save for what we got.
  
  But honestly, those are minor quibbles compared to the beauty of this book. It's one that should be read by everyone.
• 
  Steph Su

  THE FREEDOM MAZE is an odd and intriguing book, blending two historical periods with mystical elements. At its core, though, this is a traditional coming-of-age story—which actually makes it hard for me to decide how I feel about this book.
  
  In middle school, I read a book called
  The Devil s Arithmetic by
  Jane Yolen, which tells the story of a modern girl who gets thrown back in time to WWII Europe. THE FREEDOM MAZE follows the same storypath. It is clear that Sherman has meticulously done her research on both time periods: the dialogue feels authentic, social beliefs ingrained, and details regarding setting extraordinary. It’s hard enough accurately depicting one historical period; Delia Sherman has to make everyone look like underachievers by doing so for two!
  
  All of that is the backdrop, however, for the classic bildungsroman structure of this story. THE FREEDOM MAZE involves slavery and racism and Southern culture, but it’s not interested in that so much as it is in Sophie’s development from a petulant child to a more independent teenager. And that’s where my potential love for this book trips up. Sophie is sympathetic at the beginning of the novel, when she is ordered this way and that by her “Southern belle” mother and grandmother, but when half the book passes and Sophie is still petulant and incompetent, my sympathy for her waned a bit. Of course, it wouldn’t be a bildungsroman if Sophie didn’t eventually learn, but it was a bit of a struggle for me in the middle to continue to be invested in the well-being of a timid and fretful girl. Think Mary from
  The Secret Garden, thrust into the pre-Civil War American South.
  
  THE FREEDOM MAZE is not a book for those who like their plots and pacing action-packed and always-running. I put the book down several times out of repetitiveness and Sophie’s stagnancy before I began to be invested. And while I’m glad to have finished it, half of a book with a slow plot and fretful main character is still too much for me to like it fully. THE FREEDOM MAZE will be best for patient readers who like their readings challenging, well-researched, and with just a dash of the fantastical.