Johnny's participation in the rebellion, including the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere's midnight ride, and the American Revolution, leads him to find an identity and purpose in life that had previously been missing.
Some critics, like Joel Taxel in his essay "The American Revolution in Children's Fiction," claim the book demonstrates too much patriotism, which can get in the way of telling a balanced story. Taxel quotes Alistair Cooke as saying that the patriotism in Johnny Tremain becomes "a flattering explanation of a complicated story … [that] satisfies our insatiable hunger for good guys and bad guys." However, others have perceived the book as conveying the depth of the tense time by presenting the ambiguous positions of the characters, the human side of both the colonists and the British soldiers encamped in Boston, and the inner turmoil and severe consequences of going to war. At the same time, the book champions human rights and liberty.
Though other historical novels of the American Revolution have been written since 1943, few have replaced Forbes's Johnny Tremain in popularity, not even the often-compared My Brother Sam Is Dead (1974) by James and Chris Collier.
This is a free page. This page contains 182 words. This
article contains 9,050 words (approx. 30 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Johnny Tremain - Esther Forbes - 1943 Access Pass.
