MMGM: Brotherhood, by A. B. Westrick

How could you not love this cover?

For today’s Marvelous Middle Grade Monday, I’m reviewing a book that really struck me as fitting that description. I was lucky enough to receive an ARC of Brotherhood, by A. B. Westrick through Goodreads; I’d fallen in love with the cover already, and what was inside the covers did not disappoint.

Brotherhood, with its wonderfully multi-layered title, is the story of Shad Weaver, a fourteen-year-old tailor in post-Civil War Virginia, who has to confront what he's always believed to be true in order to get what he's always dreamed of. By night, he's the newest member of the newly-formed Ku Klux Klan, determined to protect the rights of orphans and war widows from the oppression of the damn Yankees--as well as to impress his "perfect" older brother Jeremiah. By day, he sneaks into a school for colored children in order to get the reading lessons he's wanted for so long. Of course, it doesn't take long for the two lives to collide in dangerous ways.

I loved the recreation of the Reconstruction period--especially as A. B. Westrick gave us a view not of the upper-crust world of the south, but of the poor tradesmen who may have suffered most as a result of the war. Shad's prejudice against "Yankees" and "coloreds" struck me as one of the most believable portrayals I've read of this kind of opinion so unpopular in our current world.

It can be hard for writers to create characters that are at once authentic and likable by today’s standards. Our world values tolerance above most other virtues, whereas Shad’s world--and centuries and centuries beyond him--gave it little importance. As jarring as it was on occasion to read Shad’s totally one-sided thinking, it gave his character a beautiful fullness. See, we’ve come to appreciate that just because people look different than we do doesn’t mean they’re somehow less. But... we often fail to realize that just because someone believes something different than we do, it doesn’t make them automatically evil. Shad thought it “just wasn’t right” for him to teach a group of colored children how to sew--what ideas it would give them! Not exactly a currently politically correct way of thinking. But because the author was able to delve so thoroughly into Shad’s mind and background, you realized that this opinion said more about his world than about him. We learn about him through what he actively does, through the way he allows his experiences to change his worldview, through the courage he shows in eventually standing up--even in a small way--against what was generally accepted. If the author had whitewashed his prejudices, it would only have served to belittle his subsequent bravery.

Brotherhood releases in September, and I highly encourage you to get a copy and share it with young readers in your life. You can find author A. B. Westrick at her website (abwestrick.com) and on Twitter (@ABWestrick).