Zetta Elliott is best known among middle grade readers for her poetic picture book text, Bird, which garnered numerous awards when it came out from Lee & Low in 2008. Since then, she has published the YA time-travel fantasy A Wish After Midnight (Amazon Encore, 2010), which takes contemporary Brooklyn teen Genna Colon to her 
neighborhood during the Civil War Draft Riots, and this month Amazon Encore is releasing Elliott’s middle grade time-travel novel, Ship of Souls. The new novel portrays 11-year-old Dmitri, known as D, numb with grief since the death of his overprotective and reclusive mother from breast cancer. The boy faces many transitions in his life—having been homeschooled, he now attends public school for the first time; his foster mother is overwhelmed with a new special needs foster baby; and a strange white bird that he has rescued in the park is now talking to him. Tutoring math at his new school, D finds new friends in basketball player Hakeem, who sometimes chafes against the rules set by his strict Muslim family, and beautiful Nyla, who resents her military family’s frequent moves. When the talking bird draws D into a dangerous portal leading to the eighteenth century African burial ground, Keem and Nyla must demonstrate their friendship by following D there and proving that he still has an attachment to the everyday world.
In contrast to many works of urban fantasy, Elliott concentrates less on world building and more on building the reader’s emotional attachment to her characters, particularly her protagonist, D. If more authors of fantasy did the same, I would read more fantasy. The author sets up a compelling and memorable character by giving him a mother who loves him more than anything else in the world, the tragic circumstances of the mother’s death, his effort to make the best of his situation by becoming a tutor and helping others at his new school, and his concern for helpless animals in his rescue of the injured bird. Then she leads him into a heart-wrenching dilemma—because D is “unattached” with no other living family, he has been given the dangerous mission of sending the souls of the enslaved, buried under Lower Manhattan, back to Africa. This story will appeal especially to middle grade boys, who’ll appreciate both the fast-paced adventure and the fact that the author has created a safe space to explore emotional issues experienced by many of her target readers.
I will be interviewing Zetta Elliott later this week for The Pirate Tree, so please check back. And in the meantime, check out Ship of Souls!
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