I'm very conflicted about Ann Rinaldi's new book, The Ever-After Bird. (This is going to be a spoilerific post so skip if you plan to read it.) It's a MG historical fiction about a girl who goes to live with her aunt and uncle after her abolitionist father is killed in a dispute over fugitive slaves (her mother died as a baby). CeCe does not share her family's anti-slavery zeal - she sees it as work that caused chaos in her life and her father's death (which is weird as he was abusive and very difficult to live with). Her uncle is determined to change her mind and proposes taking her with him on a trip down south where he plans to alert as many slaves as possible to the route of the Underground Railroad. His cover is that he is not only a doctor but an ornithologist as well and is working on a book on GA's birds (one bird he is seeking is the Scarlet Ibis, otherwise known as the "Ever-After" bird of the title). CeCe agrees to go out of curiosity over just who her uncle is and how he draws his birds so well. Of course by the end of the book she has uncovered several family secrets (one plot line), learned to deal with the fact that her gentle uncle kills birds so he can draw them (another plot line) and becomes ardently anti-slave (third plot line!). A lot of that is rather predictable, I mean it's not like CeCe was going to suddenly embrace the idea of owning 100 slaves or anything like that. But there is a very weird wrinkle in the slavery plot line and I don't know what to do with it.

As it turns out, Uncle Alex has an assistant, Earline, who is a student at nearby Oberlin College. Earline is an escaped slave herself and she has some sort of project she's working on that involves her going back south (she is constantly taking notes during the trip). Earline will have to pretend to be Alex's slave during the trip which is understandably tough, but she is rude to CeCe from the very beginning (when they are still in Ohio) because the teen apparently reminds her of the girl who she answered to back when she was in slavery. Right there I thought that was odd - clearly CeCe could not be the first white girl Earline had been in contact with since she fled the south. Alex suggests Earline is jealous of CeCe's relationship with him - but the man is married and Rinaldi goes out of her way to show how much he loves his wife (who by the way is paralyzed from the waist down due to an accident that also killed their son - that would be part of the family secrets plot). So why is Earline jealous of CeCe? But that was just odd at first, and not a major stumbling point except that Earline just keeps being obnoxious and CeCe can't figure out what to do with her and Alex keeps being understanding and by the third incident of Earline the bitch (and I'm sorry, that's what she acts like), all my sympathy for that character was long gone.

And that's a problem because you really need to sympathize with Earline in this book for it to work.

Soon enough they are on their way and stopping at plantations, meeting the whites and blacks and looking for birds. The ugliness of slavery is easily revealed, and CeCe starts to think twice about the whole abolitionist thing. As for Earline, well in between playing her role as faithful slave and taking furtive notes, she starts exchanging long soulful looks with the man Alex hired to drive their carriage - the white man. And then (in like two days) she tells CeCe she loves him and then (like two days later) she tells her they plan to marry in a wedding in the slave quarters of the plantation they have just arrived at - in Georgia. CeCe thinks she is insane but Earline is in LOVE!! She can not be stopped! It's all so wonderful!

And of course many many bad things happen but CeCe emerges as enlightened and heroic, Alex is brave and heroic and Earline is damaged and alone. (Don't ask about the white guy she was going to marry.) And then, other than an epilogue explaining what happened years later, the story ends. It was all about CeCe finding her moment and the fact that it came only because Earline was colossally stupid doesn't seem to be the point. In fact, Earline acting like she hasn't got the brain in her head she needed to get into college in the first place is not at all part of the story. She's the necessary foil for CeCe's character development and that's all. When I realized that, I also realized something else - all of the black characters in this book are there just for the white ones to look good.

Am I the only one who has a problem with that?

I mean how is it possible that Earline, who as it turns out was raped and impregnated by her master, should fall for a southern white man in like 15 minutes on the one hand, while still struggling so much with memories of the long ago evil daughter of the house that she has to be rude to CeCe? Are there no black men she finds appealing? And what about the fact that the only black man the group exchanges more than a couple of words with is a slave in some kind of torture device that Alex tries to free and can't - and so the poor guy ends up drowning himself. White people are powerful - either powerful good or powerful bad (and there are several nasty ones in the story) while black people are weak - all of them enslaved, confused, and at the whim of their emotions to the detriment of their own and everyone else's safety. They sit waiting for the kindly whites to come and show them the way north and without white help, it is clear they will never be free. (And Earline is a prime example of how without white help, they will still be in trouble even after freedom.)

There are so many things wrong with this.

But - and here is where I get conflicted - I can see a lot of little white girls enjoying CeCe's story. They will like how she slowly comes into her own, gets over her own childhood abuse, saves Earline and acts very very bravely. They will likely also be intrigued by what Alex does with the birds and how CeCe comes to grip with that. So as a reviewer, should I be thinking of those little girls and seeing the merits of the book? But what about the little black girls? All they have is crazy Earline - or should they be identifying with CeCe also? I don't think the book is racist, it's just screwed up but what do I do with that opinion? And thent what really really bugs me is that I can't see how this book can be historical fiction when it hinges on something that seems so outside the realm of possibility it is hard for me to bear. A former horribly abused slave falls in love inside of a week with a white man in southern Georgia and risks everything to marry him right then and there? I mean putting aside the fact that it's a white guy she falls for, is it so impossible to imagine they wait a week until Ohio?

Am I crazy or is this just so far removed from reality that it shouldn't even call itself historical fiction?

Frustrating, very frustrating. And now I have to write a review that is negative and I hate that but I don't see how I have a choice. This is a nicely written story that is something other (rather intentional or accidental) than it seems to be and that bothers me, that bothers me a lot.