The Good Lord Bird

This book is, on its face, a sardonic, strange, delightful, and wild retelling of the story of John Brown from the perspective of a formerly enslaved teenager, who John Brown half rescues, half kidnaps, and who is bullied by the Old Man into pretending he is a girl. The story is phenomenally researched and brilliantly told, and the tone accomplishes the magnificent feat of being simultaneously iconoclastic and generous—perhaps even irreverent and reverent. This is a must-read.

Rollicking fictionalized account of John Brown’s rebellion, which was told by a teenage escaped slave who reluctantly joined Brown while being mistaken for a girl.

The book has a dark sense of humor about often-grim events, from its opening gunfight to the attack on Harper’s Ferry and its aftermath, but what I appreciated was its slave’s-eye view of the events leading up to the Civil War, with a gripping narration from an adventurous youth.

At first, I was hesitant to read this book because the set-up sounded preposterous – a Black boy disguised as a girl called Onion travels with abolitionist John Brown from Kansas to Harper’s Ferry. Yet, however improbable the protagonist may be, author James McBride explores real history through Onion’s eyes.

The story starts in Kansas when abolitionists and pro-slavery factions are battling over the territory’s future. (Kansas is not yet a state.) It ends in Harper’s Ferry with Brown’s raid on the armory, an event that helped spark the Civil War.

Some of the action does feel exaggerated or… show more.