From Publishers Weekly
From its lurid title to its lackluster plotting and prose, this time-slip fantasy of an African-American boy who travels back to the antebellum South to be taught the lessons of slavery firsthand delivers far less than the premise might suggest. In order to become a full-fledged member of the Cobra gang, 12-year-old Jordan must raise the money for a gun. He steals his grandfather's gold watch, which once belonged to the slaveholder who owned one of Jordan's forebears. On his way to the pawnshop, Jordan rushes through an underpass and suddenly finds himself on a Southern plantation. Whitmore (The Bread Winner) touches upon many of the evils of slavery?backbreaking labor, squalid living conditions, physical punishment, auctions, death, even, glancingly, miscegenation?but with the formulaic writing and superficial characterizations, readers are not likely to be moved. The lesson that Jordan takes back to the city?that gangs are the contemporary version of slavery?may be a profound one, but here it seems facile and unconvincing. Ages 11-up.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From School Library Journal
Grade 5-8-Determined not to move to an integrated suburb, 12-year-old Jordan Henning Scott plans to run away and live with his newfound gang friends, but the heirloom watch he steals from his grandfather to finance this venture transports him back in time. Finding himself in the old South, Jordan meets Uriah, a slave boy who takes him to the Henning plantation. Jordan is presumed to be a runaway slave, put to exhausting work picking cotton, and whipped when he collapses. After he tries to run away, he is sold to a slave trader and then bought by a sympathizer who gives him freedom papers and promises to send him to Canada if he will return to the Henning plantation and convince Uriah to leave. The master, who turns out to be Uriah's father, had recently brought the boy into the big house and given him his watch for safekeeping. When Jordan finds the watch again, he is returned to his own time. Left behind, Uriah takes the papers and Jordan's name to Canada and becomes Jordan's great-great-great-great-grandfather. Readers who can overlook awkward dialogue and an unlikely plot will be caught up in the boy's efforts to survive and appropriately appalled by the details of daily life. The premise of a modern eye looking at the grim realities of slavery was used more successfully, but for older readers, by Octavia Butler in Kindred (Beacon, 1988); Trapped, however, might intrigue readers looking for quick-moving historical fiction.
Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DCCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
