"47" by Walter Mosley (Little, Brown Young Readers, 0316016357, $7.99)

African-American novelist Walter Mosley is probably best known for his bestselling adult crime fiction, especially his Easy Rawlins detective series set in the Watts neighborhood of southern Los Angeles. But in this unique teen novel, Mosley’s first and now new in paperback, he takes a very different turn, blending together American history, African legend, and imaginative science fiction elements to tell an engrossing story of hope and self-liberation.

The setting is a Georgia cotton plantation in 1832, and the main character is an orphan boy known to everyone only as slave number Forty-seven. He’s at the age where he’s no longer considered a child but rather a young man, and so he must take his place in the men’s barracks and go to work in the fields. Forty-seven takes the changes hard and misses his surrogate mother terribly until he meets a strange visitor who calls himself Tall John.

Tall John is a total mystery. He seems to be a runaway slave, but he claims to have sailed from a place beyond Africa in a ship moved by sunlight. While captivating and confusing everyone on the plantation with his contraband stories of freedom and self-reliance, John reveals to Forty-seven many wondrous tools and high-tech tricks that look almost like magic. He tells the young boy that he has arrived to help him fulfill his destiny as a hero who will fight a great battle to save Tall John’s alien people and eventually help to lead his fellow slaves into the promised land of freedom.

With these instantly intriguing characters and an always-captivating plot, Mosley turns the book’s direction from historical fiction towards a wholly unique blend of legend and science fiction. Forty-seven slowly begins to believe in his own future and in Tall John’s stories of the trickster figure High John the Conqueror, and so he comes to choose for himself the destiny he most wishes to pursue.

While it follows in the classic fantasy tradition of Madeleine L'Engle’s "A Wrinkle in Time" and of the thoughtful adventure stories of Ursula K. Le Guin, Mosley’s "47" remains a strikingly original young-adult novel that uses elements of myth and speculative fiction to address real-world issues of race and self-liberation. It’s also a remarkably entertaining adventure through time, space, and history. The book is set to become a classic of youth science fiction, and it’s an excellent choice to feature for Black History Month.

Recommended for readers ages 12 and older.

Review by Mark David Bradshaw, January 3, 2007