My Home is Over Jordan by Sandra Forrester

Simone is perfecting her English, since French is her usual language readers glimpse her pampered but insecure existence through her adolescent habits and desires.

Simone and her extended family are “gens de couleur libre”-free people of color-of African and European parentage. The diary is 13-year-old Simone’s, writing from April to July 1838 in New Orleans.

8-14)įar more engaging for its history than its story, this novel in the form of a diary never catches fire. (b&w maps, photos, reproductions) (Fiction. Through Sean’s eyes, the history of this era and the magnitude of his and his fellow workers’ achievements come alive Durbin has no trouble making Sean’s world palpable, and readers will slog along with Sean every step of the way on his long and arduous journey to building a railroad and becoming a man. At night, everyone is usually too tired to do anything but sleep, but Sundays are free, and Sean discovers the rough and rowdy world of the towns that seem to sprout up from nowhere along the railroad’s path over the prairie. Pa, who carries terrible memories of his stint in the Civil War and of the death three years ago of Sean’s mother, is already a foreman for the railroad, but Sean must start at the bottom, as a water carrier, toting barrels of it to the thirsty men who are doing the back-breaking work on the line.

It’s August 1897, and Sean has just arrived from Chicago, planning to work with his father on the Intercontinental Railroad. In the My Name Is America series, Durbin (Wintering, 1999, etc.) offers the story of Sean Sullivan, whose first day in Omaha, Nebraska, brings him face to face with a victim of an Indian attack the man survived, but carries his bloody scalp in a bucket.

My Home is Over Jordan by Sandra Forrester