Sometimes, though, the ability to imagine yourself away from your life doesn't seem like enough. Any kid who has loved books like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or Alice in Wonderland has likely at some time wished that they could really travel to that magical world, have all those wonderful adventures, and be home before anyone knew they were gone. This is definitely true for thirteen-year-old Sophie Martineau, who, at the start of The Freedom Maze, isn't having an easy time growing up in 1960s Louisiana. Her parents are divorced, her father's moved to New York, she's having to move to a new house and school and leave all her friends behind, and, because her mother now has to go to school and find a job, she is being sent to spend the summer with her grandmother and aunt on an old plantation down on the bayou.
Sophie feels out of place everywhere she goes. She is a bookworm and a late bloomer, she lost all her friends in the scandal that is being the child of divorced parents in the 1960s, her mother is constantly lecturing her on how to be a proper lady, and the house she is visiting and the people living there are all still mourning a way of life that was lost when the Civil War ended. She initially thinks she's going to hate spending the summer with her relatives, but she cultivates a positive relationship with her aunt, who allows her to go exploring all around the old plantation without lecturing her about acting like a lady, and while she's out exploring the old garden maze and the bayou, she hears a disembodied voice that talks to her and teases her and answers questions like the Cheshire Cat. Sophie is eager to believe in magic and fairytales, and she is desperate for an adventure like the kind she reads about in her favorite books, so after a big fight with her mother when she comes to visit, she asks the voice to send her back into the past to have a grand adventure. The voice obliges, and sends her back in time to the same plantation in 1860, where she gets mistaken for a slave.
Believing that she will find her adventure soon enough, Sophie accepts this as part of the trickster spirit's plan for her and does her best to adapt to her new life. Initially, when things get hard, she begs the voice to send her home, but when it tells her that he can't until her story is over, she begins to accept this as her life, even to the point of almost forgetting that she is from the future and has a home and family back there to return to. And yet, accepting slavery as her adventure turns out to be good for her. She makes friends, has her prejudices turned on their head, learns some hard truths about herself, and comes home a strong, confident young woman who is now willing and able to stand up to her mother and begin to make her own way in the world.
This book was a uniquely realistic take on the time-traveling adventure story. The writing style was straightforward and descriptive, but did a wonderful job of painting clear pictures of the setting--Louisiana in 1960 and in 1860--and of the characters. Parts of it near the beginning and in the middle seemed to drag on, and the ending comes abruptly and leaves a lot of stories unfinished, but the pacing does not detract from the overall story, especially when you are being pulled along initially by the desire to find out how she ends up back in time, and through the rest of the book by the desire to find out how she manages to get home again.
The Freedom Maze is both good fantasy and good historical fiction, as well as a great coming-of-age story for any pre-teen or young teenage girl. It is also a well-written window into a time, place, and social perspective that is all-too-often glossed over or ignored completely, especially in young-adult fiction, and would make a great conversation-starter with young people on the culture and attitudes in the United States that allowed slavery to last as long as it did and that allow racism to persist to this day.
The Freedom Maze, by Delia Sherman
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