Elijah of Buxton

I've read all of Curtis's books with my younger child, and this has to be the most evocative, heartbreaking, inspirational of them all. I love all of his books, but this one includes a scene so moving that I will never forget it.

Fiction and non-fiction about slavery isn't new or rare, and much of it feels like trauma porn after a while. This book is relatively unique in my experience, set in a (real life Canadian) colony founded by escaped enslaved people and their children born in freedom. Our hero Elijah is born in freedom in Canada, a rare narrator in children's literature.