Tag: Erica Armstrong Dunbar

Review: She Came to Slay

“With no promise of a pension, Harriet and her friends began the planning of her memoir, a narrative that would be printed and sold with the hopes of finding a large readership that could generate significant income.” p. 116

She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman by Erica Armstrong Dunbar, illustrated by Monica Ahanonu.
37Ink, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2019.
Nonfiction, 162 pages.
Not yet leveled.

A unique biography of the FULL life of Harriet Tubman.

She Came to Slay resized
She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman by Erica Armstrong Dunbar.

I ordered this sight unseen because we had the ability to buy a certain amount of books and there wasn’t time to do a deep dive into each one before the gift card and sale expired.  So literally my only knowledge about this was 1) the cover and blurb, and 2) that Dunbar had written Never Caught, which I’d heard good things about but had yet to read.

Honestly I didn’t even know what age level it was for.  Never Caught is available in both adult and YRE versions.  I’m still not sure what age this was intended for, but it could work from middle school all the way up to adult readers.  Dunbar doesn’t avoid the difficult parts of Harriet Tubman’s life, but she doesn’t dwell on them either.  Remember that Minty was beaten, permanently injured, cheated on, and witnessed extreme systemic racism from Northern “allies”, among other things.  For younger or family use, I’d suggest pre-reading it first to see if it would fit your particular classroom or personal situation. Continue reading “Review: She Came to Slay”