Clearly Virginia Hamilton is concerned as a writer with the black, or non-white, experience. To the best of my recollection, no fictional character in any of her work up to the time of writing is white. But there is no taint of racism in her books; as she said herself in [her article "High John is Risen Again"] 'the experience of a people must come to mean the experience of humankind.' All through her work runs an awareness of black history, and particularly of black history in A...

Tree—short for Teresa—is a black girl with a world of problems. She has never known a father. Her mother is a nurse and stays away for weeks at a time. School means little to Tree. Not only must she cook and keep house, but she has to take care of her older brother Dab, who is marginally retarded and also exhibits symptoms of another illness; he cringes from light, grows absent-minded and distracted, sometimes experiences severe pain. Tree and her brother are extremely close; in the small apar...

The Gathering, volume three of Virginia Hamilton's alluring but incohesive trilogy, is an innovative book; likely to engender a spate of analysis from Black Studies Departments, it is difficult to understand and not easy to read…. Justice, Thomas, Levi and Dorian (transformed in a time warp into "the unit") have returned to Dustland (a country akin to the dust storm-plagued mid-west prairies of the 1930s) in order to guide the decrepit three-legged Slaker mutants to freedom. But ...

Few writers of fiction for young people are as daring, inventive, and challenging to read—or to review—as Virgina Hamilton. Frankly making demands on her readers, she nevertheless expresses herself in a style essentially simple and concise—though often given to outbursts of intense feeling. And meeting those demands, the reader not only forgives but learns to enjoy her small lapses into obscurity, which a less subtle writer would find intolerable. Not quite fifteen, Tree (short for Tere...

Virginia Hamilton likes dangerous edges. She tries things that might not work. Her books are experimental, different, strange. She runs bravely along the edges of cliffs. Her characters also exist on the edges of things. Often they cross the border into adolescence, teeming out of childhood into the chancy independence of maturity with a bursting strength that sometimes brims over into violence. They are black, but their color is not what is most important about them. At Virginia Hamilton's best, her...

"The Gathering" is the third volume of a trilogy about time travel that might conveniently be called science fiction but is more accurately described as a poet's flight into the future, in the same vein as Marge Piercy's "Woman on the Edge of Time" though unfortunately not as successful…. In volume one of this series ("Justice and Her Brothers" …) "Ticey," her twin brothers and their friend Dorian discover that they share a ...

The four children who make up ["the unit" in Dustland], Thomas, Levi, Justice and Dorian, and who in their encounter with "the future" sometimes lose "psychic chunks", are so scantily drawn as to evade the imagination. However assiduously we follow up clues and try to interpret allegories (even with recourse to The New Testament, Tolkien, or Psychic News), without a picture of the children, only available in Dustland's precursor, Justice and her Brothers or t...

Reading Virginia Hamilton is like being shot out of a cannon into the Milky Way. Sometimes just a phrase sends you off, an image or a scene, but invariably at the end of a book you marvel: look how high I've been just on words! Indeed such is the extraordinary quality of Miss Hamilton's imagination that her characters seem to have to go faster than other fictional characters just to keep up with her. They speed past, splintering time: M. C. Higgins (in the award-winning book of that name) swim...

"Never before has black creative intelligence coincided so opportunely with the development of black pride, the advancement of political-cultural awareness, independence, and style to affect black art" wrote Virginia Hamilton in a 1975 article "High John Is Risen Again" … Nowhere is this "black creative intelligence" so evident as in Virginia Hamilton's own writing, first in M. C. Higgins The Great, and now in her latest book … Arilla Sun Down. ...

There are those who say that Virginia Hamilton is a great writer but that her books are hard to get into. [Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush] is not. It fairly reaches off the first page to grab you, and once it's got you, it sets you spinning deeper and deeper into its story. Needless to say, this is not a conventional ghost story. In fact, the function of the ghost in this book is to provide 14-year-old Tree Pratt with a place from which to view her world. (p. 41) Through the space of [the ghost of] Bro...

A stunningly good, absolutely compelling, weird and unique book, Virginia Hamilton's [The Planet of Junior Brown] is the story of three outsiders in New York City: Junior Brown and Buddy Clark, both in their early teens, and Mr. Pool, a one-time teacher and now school custodian. While all three are black, what they suffer at the hands of an uncaring, unfeeling world might be suffered by anybody, anytime, anywhere. Buddy, parentless and on his own, lives by his wits in deserted building where he is th...

No one can claim that "Dustland," the second book in Virginia Hamilton's trilogy, can stand alone. Nothing is meant to be resolved, and I confess that it's hard to wait for the last and decisive volume. It's not simply that I'm impatient at the interruption of narrative; I want to know what Virginia Hamilton thinks. Is there a future for mankind? That's the kind of question she's leading up to and that's what I want to know. And I won't k...

Junior Brown [the protagonist of "The Planet of Junior Brown"] is a fat, black, hopeless boy, a 300-pound musical prodigy whose mother has untied the wires of the family piano. He sweats profusely, talks to himself, reaches out on the street to touch the faces of passing strangers and beats out his music lesson on the back of a chair. He looks like Buddha and eats like Paul Bunyan. Into his miserable life come two friends: the janitor, Mr. Pool, once a teacher but now custodian of the high-sch...

Virginia Hamilton is a writer of rare depth and range. Her subjects, her stories, her style, continue to press forward and away from what she has written before. "Dustland" is an exception only because it follows "Justice and Her Brothers" and ought to be read as part of the Justice cycle. Dustland is a place—or is it simply the future?—to which Justice and her twin brothers and their friend travel in their minds. The four children, each endowed with extrasensory po...

[Until] recently it was rare to find an American under 18 who knew who Paul Robeson is. However, within less than a year, several of his old films have been revived, black students at Rutgers named their student center for him, and a three part series on Robeson, sponsored by National Educational Television, won an Emmy. Now Robeson's renaissance is further enhanced by Virginia Hamilton's outstanding biography [Paul Robeson: The Life and Times of a Free Black Man]. In a lively narrative style,...

The last few years have seen a slow trickle of children's stories with Negro characters. For the most part these "integrated" books have been the work of white writers who too often have substituted sentimentality and good will for authenticity and depth of feeling. In "The House of Dies Drear" we have a story about black people, written by a black writer, Virginia Hamilton, whose first book, "Zeely," won a prize for promoting interracial understanding. Above...

[The Planet of Junior Brown, a] powerful, haunting, troubling book, contrasts sanity and madness, endorsement and rejection of life, commitment to others and absorption with self. Characters are at once individual and deeply symbolic. They are complex and act in ways that are often inconsistent, inimical to their own interests, and totally irrational, yet their behavior is haunting and disquieting and echoes with broader meaning. The treatment of Junior Brown's withdrawal from reality is paradoxical....

[In Justice and Her Brothers, with] school out for the summer and their parents gone for most of the day, 11-year-old Justice is left in the company of her twin brothers, Thomas and Levi, two years older and as different in personality as they are identical in appearance…. The surface action involves Justice's attempts to keep up with her brothers and their gang in such average-kid activities as riding bicycles and catching snakes, but the subtle, sometimes confusing psychic power-struggle und...

[The House of Dies Drear is an] unusual, highly intriguing story skillfully incorporating Civil War history. Thirteen-year-old Thomas Small, his father (a Civil War historian), his mother and brothers arrive at their new home in a small Ohio town…. Thomas is both fascinated and frightened by the legends of escaped slaves, the eccentric old caretaker Pluto; the uncharted passageways of the house, unnerving noises, vandalism in-tended to frighten the Smalls away, forbidding neighbors with threatening s...

At the start of Virginia Hamilton's Zeely, Miss Elizabeth and Master John Perry are traveling by train to Uncle Ross' farm for the summer. New holiday names are quickly minted—Elizabeth is Geeder and John is Toeboy. Miss Hamilton tells with perfect, nostalgic descriptions of the uncle's old farmhouse, of country days and doings, good country things to eat, and of summer nights slept in the dewy outdoors, of moonlight tricks and exchanged whispers in the dark. Best of all, this is...

Virginia Hamilton is a craftsman, often good at being just that and nothing more. Biographical artist she is not, in [Paul Robeson: The Life and Times of a Free Black Man], perhaps because of her lack of range and her deficient sympathy in capturing, even for children, the protean character of Paul Robeson. She merely suggests and, given the stature of Robeson, one ought to expect and receive more depth, more insight from a biographer. Perhaps this biography has merit in being pitched to a youthful reader&#...

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois struggled for ninety-five years as educator, writer, intellectual, and poet against prejudice and fear, so that black people throughout the world could claim their blackness with pride, their humanity with honor. There is no easy definition for such a man; perhaps the most honest approach is simply to chronicle his achievements and let them speak for themselves. [Virginia Hamilton in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography] has done just that. With grace and dignity she has recounted th...

Virginia Hamilton's ["Arilla Sun Down"] delicately explores one of the most ignored facts of American society: that a great many "vanishing Americans" did not really vanish, but were absorbed instead into the relatively friendly black community. The evidence is everywhere for those who are willing to see it: Plains and Cherokee features appear startlingly at the windows of many sharecroppers' shacks and ghetto tenements, as well as in newspaper and magazine pictures...

The author of Zeely has surpassed her earlier excellent achievement by dramatizing the history of an Underground Railroad Station in Ohio [in The House of Dies Drear], viewed from its extraordinary present-day milieu…. In depicting Pluto, the bizarre ancient caretaker of the place, and the macabre play-acting devised by his son to scare off the greedy neighbors, Miss Hamilton establishes an almost Gothic atmosphere. Successful in presenting the seemingly occult, she does well, too, with the plain and...

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," W.E.B. DuBois wrote prophetically in 1903. Virginia Hamilton's excellent biography, W.E.B. DuBois …, is a tribute to the lifetime he spent trying to solve that problem. Her book follows him through his years with the NAACP, which he helped found. It outlines the great struggles which threatened the civil rights movement from without—whites vs. black—and from within—DuBois vs. Booker T. W...

[Carefully] researched and documented, sympathetic toward the subject yet candid about his failings, [W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography] is a sober record of the long career of William Du Bois. The biography concentrates on his adult life, giving a detailed account of the teacher, writer, and political activist and very little about his personal life. This lacks the warmth that characterizes Virginia Hamilton's fiction, but it makes a particular contribution in placing the events of Du Bois' life no...