About This Book:
From the author of Eliza’s Freedom Road and Calico Girl comes a historical middle grade adventure about an enslaved girl’s journey on the Overland Trail to California during the Gold Rush, and how she took the chance to fight for freedom.
In Alexandria, Virginia, in the mid-19th century, a slave-owning family is facing financial trouble. The eldest son, Jason, thinks going to California to mine for gold might be the best way to protect his father’s legacy. He’ll need a cook, a laundress, and a hostler for the journey, and one of them is twelve-year-old Clementine, whose mother calls her Hope.
From Independence, Missouri—the “Gateway to the West”—she and the others join a wagon train on the Emigrant Overland Trail. But what Jason didn’t consider is taking the three enslaved people west will give them an opportunity to free themselves—manifesting their destiny.
*Review Contributed By Karen Yingling, Staff Reviewer*
New look at Westward Expansion
Even though I loved Carr’s Children of the Covered Wagon (1934) when I was young, there are not a lot of newer titles about Westward Expansion. Philbrick’s Stay Alive does cover the disastrous Donner Party, which is mentioned in Hope’s Path, but I wouldn’t mind seeing more titles. It was definitely interesting to follow the exploits of Black members of a pioneer group, and while there were several instances when they met Native Americans, there’s not too much discussion about the problems that the pioneers caused.
I was briefly confused; the cover is so similar to Daley’s If the Fire Comes: A Story of Segregation During the Great Depression that I thougth this was another of Jolly Fish Press’ I Am America series. Even the format is somewhat similar, and there’s a nice time line of Westward Expansion events at the end of the book, and a fantastic source list. Definitely hand this to fans of either the Dear America or I Am America series, or readers who enjoyed Nolen’s Eliza’s Freedom Road: An Underground Railroad Diary (2017).
