6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
From the pen of Moses, June 20, 2005
This review is from: The Legend of Buddy Bush (Coretta Scott King Author Honor Books) (Hardcover)
I've often railed, in my various Amazon.com reviews, against simplistic children's books. For thousands of adults, children's books (to them) are meant to be straightforward tales of good and evil. The good guys are always good. The bad guys are very bad. And this is especially true for poorly written books that deal with race and racism in America. So it was with great trepidation that I picked up, "The Legend of Buddy Bush". Sure, it had won the coveted Coretta Scott King Award. Sure, it also garnered itself a hard-to-get National Book Award Honor. But I've read plenty of award winners that left a sour taste in my mouth. The fact that this was author Shelia P. Moses' first children's book was not encouraging. Most first time authors make all the usual mistakes. Fortunately for us, Ms. Moses is not most authors.
There are a lot of things in this world that Pattie Mae likes. She likes eating her grandma's plump strawberries straight from the garden when no one's looking. She likes sitting and talking with her grandfather for long periods of time. She likes getting letters from her elder sister in Harlem and dreaming of the day she can leave this poor North Carolina town. And she loves her Uncle Buddy. Buddy's not strictly related to her per say, but he's always been a part of her family, especially since he returned from living in New York City. Now Pattie Mae's grandpa is sick with a brain tumor and the girl really feels she deserves a nice trip into town with Buddy to watch a picture show. But when Buddy refuses to move off the pavement when a white woman passes him, the woman makes a big show of claiming that Buddy tried to make a pass at/rape her. Now Buddy's in the violent hands of the law and it's all Pattie Mae can do to see the two most important men in her life, her grandpa and her uncle, slip away from her for entirely different reasons.
The book bears a great deal of similarity to Mildred Taylor's chronicles of the Logan family. As with Taylor's books, the family in "The Legend of Buddy Bush" are black land holders. Also, they must deal with their white prejudiced neighbors at every turn. But this book stands on its own as well. For one thing, no one here is a perfect saint. Our heroine, Pattie Mae, is apt to silently insult and detest her female relations while placing the men in the family on their own separate pedestals. Her Uncle Buddy is a male chauvinist pig who obeys his father but doesn't think twice about ignoring his mother. Every person in this book is a well-rounded believable human being. They aren't perfect or always heroic. The men boss the women around and the women boss the men. In the end, however, these are people you end up caring for. So when tragedy comes to Uncle Buddy, you hate to watch it happen. You may not feel he's the wonderful guy that Pattie Mae thinks he is, but when she and her family collapse weeping to see him working on a chain gang outside their very home, you understand why.
In the back of the book, Moses gives full credit to the real Buddy Bush and his story. She includes pictures of the barn, house, and courthouse when this tale takes place. She shows us her real grandmother and grandfather and even includes a shot of Buddy Bush himself. She also tells the story of the real Buddy, complete with the elements that are like and unlike those retold in this tale. It gives it that little extra shove that brings the book from being okay to quite good.
Now I wouldn't go handing this book to your six or seven-year-old. Though the heroine is twelve there's plenty of breast squeezing and idle speculation on infidelity to make this a bit of an older reader. Still, if you know a mature child who wants a good jolt of historical fiction, aside from anything Mildred Taylor wrote (and much shorter at that) is this little tale. It's funny and quite sad, but not depressing in a pathological way. A title well worth reading.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
not well edited, September 7, 2005
I was appalled by the poor editing of this book. The author is from the neighborhood where the story is set..rural North Carolina. The basic plot is fine, being about a black man in 1947 being accused of attempted rape by a white lady because he didn't get off the sidewalk when she passed by. This is supposed to be based on a true event where said black man is arrested, hauled out of jail by the Klan to be lynched, but escapes to the swamps and then to the North.
However the 12-year-old main character interejects her own stream of consciousness into the first person present tense story. These are the problems I had: She says when her mother gets mad at her, Mother hits her with a plastic spoon.
She says that if she isn't good, she doesn't get to go to grandmother's house to watch RV. She says Grandmother gets a phone and it's YELLOW, and that the phone number is 919-555-1919.
I remember the 50's pretty well and this story takes place before that. No one had a TV in 1947, much less a poor black family who had electricity but still had an outhouse in the back. No one had plastic spoons...they would have been wooden or maybe metal. Phones didn't come in color until the end of the 50's and then they cost more each month. And it was the 60's when prefixes came into play. Before that, it would have been KE 8-1919 or TR 7-5616.
So, the author is interjecting her own memories into this story, and the editor was too young to know the difference. This is too bad, because, while the children reading this may not notice any one of these anachronisms, having done the research on the time and place would have lent a lot of authenticity.
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