The Astonishing Life Of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation,
Volume II: The Kingdom of the Waves
by M.T. Anderson
2008
From Booklist
*Starred Review* The story begun in The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation; v. 1: The Pox Party (2006), a National Book Award winner and a Printz Honor Book, continues in this volume, which offers more awe-inspiring reinterpretations of America’s birth. After escaping the members of an Enlightenment college, Octavian, a teenage black slave, flees with his sympathetic tutor to the imperiled city of Boston, where the pair pose as loyalists to the Crown. As the war escalates, Octavian joins a Loyalist navy regiment that promises freedom to African Americans and enters into battle against the Patriots. Aside from a few essential interjections from others, Octavian narrates in the same graphic, challenging language used in the previous book, which Anderson has described as a “unintelligible eighteenth-century Johnsonian Augustan prose.” But readers need not grasp every reference in the rich, elegant tangle of dialects to appreciate this piercing exposé of our country’s founding hypocrisies. Even more present in this volume are passionate questions, directly relevant to teens’ lives, about basic human struggles for independence, identity, freedom, love, and the need to reconcile the past. Viewed through historical hindsight, Octavian’s final, wounded optimism (“No other human generation hath done other than despoil, perhaps we shall be the first”) will resonate strongly with contemporary teens. Grades 10-12. --Gillian Engberg
