JUBA!

A griping historical novel, based on the life of dancer “Master Juba,” from New York Times bestselling author Walter Dean Myers. In this novel, set in the mid-nineteenth century, the intricacies of Master Juba’s meteoric rise as an explosive young black dancer are brought to life by Walter Dean Myers’ meticulous and intensive research. Charles Dickens makes two appearances!

New York City’s Five Points district in 1846 is a volatile mixture of poor blacks and immigrants from Europe. William Henry Lane is a teenager working odd jobs to make ends meet, but he really loves to dance. Watching the other dancers in Five Points and practicing when he can, he gets so good that he begins to call himself “Master Juba.”

Master Juba is just another entertainer, dancing in return for supper money, until he is brought to the attention of Charles Dickens, the great English novelist. Dickens writes about Juba and his dancing in his book American Notes, and it is as “Boz’s Juba” (Boz was Dickens’ nom de plume) that Juba performs in England with the Pell Serenaders. Juba quickly finds that, in London, he is turning heads and taking the city by storm with his dancing skills and sense of rhythm.

But what will Juba do when the Serenaders have to return to the United States? Slavery has been abolished in England; in the U.S., it still exists in all of its ugliness. Free black men and women are often captured in the North and sent down South as slaves. England offers freedoms that Juba could only dream of in the States, and returning home could prove a dangerous decision.

Walter Dean Myers was the New York Times bestselling author of Monster, the winner of the first Michael L. Printz Award;? and a former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. He was the author of two Newbery Honor Books and six Coretta Scott King Awardees, a three-time National Book Award Finalist, as well as the first-ever recipient of the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement.