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Rosie and the Race Toward Freedom: An Underground Railroad Graphic Novel
48 pages, Library Binding
Published August 1, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 23, 2025
Review being submitted to School Library Journal for an upcoming SMS article.
November 7, 2025
A graphic novel for kids set in Virginia about freedom seekers from slavery? My hopes were SO high to love this book unreservedly and buy 5 library bound copies for my elementary library, as I do a special year-long project with 4th graders focusing on Virginia history and I would heavily invest in a great graphic novel on this topic set in Virginia. But I'm very sorry to say that, at first read, I think 3 stars would even be a stretch.
Given that Girls Survive is literally the most popular series in my library that is not a graphic novel series (coming in just behind Dog Man, Baby-Sitters Club, I Survived Graphic, and Wings of Fire Graphic) I have been thrilled at the prospect of how well this new Girls Survive graphic series would circulate since I first heard there was going to be a Girls Survive Graphic series. But like the first two books in the series that I have read, Rosie and the Race Toward Freedom is extremely thin in terms of background, plot, character development, and historical context. The dialogue is simplistic and wooden and characters are not developed at all.
Still, I know my elementary readers would check this out, because the nexus of Virginia history and graphic novels in my library can't help but be popular...but this is where my greatest hesitation lies, because this depiction of freedom seekers from slavery is SO simplistic that it makes it seem like escaping from slavery was no big deal...figure out some code words, easily decipher a map, spend a night in a cellar, ford a couple of water crossings, hide during two questionings by slave catchers who were barely making an effort, sit down to a formal dinner at a dining table with a friendly white family, run onto a boat, and arrive in Philadelphia in 1859 to nearly instant happiness and freedom (despite the danger presented by the Fugitive Slave Act) and a quick reunion with two parents who traveled separately. The only slight hint of ongoing peril was in the fact that the main character and family chose to change their names, but they are excited about and proud of the new names they chose, so there is little sense of loss.
One could argue that a graphic novel for elementary readers can't get much more into detail or that young readers should be spared a sense of the terrible peril that real freedom seekers faced, including the family-shattering and often torturous punishments for unsuccessful attempts, but other books for an elementary audience manage a more complex story with much more detail...the Underground Abductor, about Harriet Tubman, in the Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales graphic novel series, Freewater by Amina Luqman Dawson, Unbound by Ann E. Burg, and even for a younger audience, Ranger in Time: Long Road to Freedom by Kate Messner. Picture books like Box: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom and The Daring Escape of Robert Smalls also come to mind as being completely appropriate for elementary audiences but having a strong sense of the gravity and danger involved in an attempt to escape enslavement.
In 2025, there are mounting and alarming efforts to whitewash the only recently told fuller truths about slavery in museums and National Park Service sites. Books like A Birthday Cake For George Washington deservedly received a huge backlash a decade ago for promulgating the myth of "happy slaves." But right now, government leaders are promoting PragerU animated videos for kids downplaying the horrors of slavery, like one that has a cartoon Frederick Douglass himself saying that slavery was a compromise that *benefitted* the country. Simplistic depictions of underground railroad stories, especially those that center white saviorism over Black self-emancipation, have long been problematic, not just for their centering of the (rare) story of white allyship, but more for the implication that running away wasn't all that difficult. After all, if slavery overall wasn't that bad, running away from slavery wasn't that difficult, lots of white people were standing at the ready to help freedom seekers, and the process of escaping involved only a few nights of discomfort and hiding, then...isn't that an implicit indictment of those who didn't successfully escape from enslavement, or never tried? It's, like, a polite Karen-nod of ostensible agreement that slavery was bad, but coupled with an eyebrow-raise and shoulder-shrug suggesting that, well, maybe people should just have bootstrapped themselves out of slavery with a small bit of gumption and if they didn't, well, it's their own fault.
With that context of what we are up against in terms of helping children have a full and accurate understanding that escape from slavery was RARE because the perils were SO high and the price of failure so catastrophic, the thinness of this story, the lack of character development, the seemingly easy and full happy ending (with the historically inaccurate sense that Philadelphia itself was truly safe in 1859) is problematic.
As I look back through its pages, it is clear that there is a real disconnect between the words by Dolores Andral, a Black author from Queens who wrote the excellent Athletes for Social Justice for kids, and the black and white illustrations of Soia di Chiara Manetti, an Italian artist. In SO many panels, the main characters' eyes depict curiosity and contentment and even joy, not terror or impending peril or sadness. One boy stepping on rocks for a river crossing has hands up in the air (rather than to the side for balance) and looks like he could be lightheartedly dancing across them. In another panel when the children are being assisted into hiding in a wagon, the adult Black wagon driver appears completely relaxed and nonchalant. In one panel when the main character talks about her father changing his name after he escaped to freedom (just days earlier) she holds a paper with the name PETER written on it with a huge beaming smile and wide eyes, as if she has just won an award she is proudly showing off...with no sense of the true feelings of grief, uncertainty, and worry that a young girl might feel not knowing if she would ever be reunited with either parent. I have appreciated this artist's illustrations of a couple of other Girls Survived illustrated chapter books before this, but in those, the pictures just illustrate the author's story; they don't carry at least an equal weight with the author in developing character, building plot, and communicating emotion. Given the vital importance to the storytelling of this graphic novel and the fact that more than half of the narrative is carried in pictures rather than words, the stark emotional incongruity of the illustrations is what most makes me unable to give Rosie an enthusiastic recommendation.
As a Virginia history geek, there is nothing unique to Virginia in the book at all...the illustrations have no sense of place, the opening plantation is nowhere specific, there is no map to show what their journey may have been, and the illustrated mass exodus of a running crowd of freedom seekers from woods to a boat leading to Philadelphia, with more boats of self-emancipated slaves arriving openly on the waterfront in Philadelphia each day, was nothing like I've ever read from historical accounts of typical escapes from Virginia. In terms of merit for developing a deeper understanding of Virginia history, there is little.
One page back matter about the Underground Railroad provides a brief explanation for some of the code words in the underground railroad network, the importance of sermons and spirituals for communicating messages to potential freedom seekers, and how the Fugitive Slave Act was part of the reason that some freedom seekers changed names even after reading a free state. A helpful one-page glossary in back defines words that may be unfamiliar, and this glossary earns my one unreserved bit of praise, for its definition of the word "enslaved", specifically, "people held involuntarily and forced under threat of violence or death to work without pay for the profit of another." That definition isn't sugarcoated or sanitized, but it is also fully appropriate for an elementary audience.
All that said, though...I probably will purchase this book for our library collection, as it *could* spark an interest in the topic in a child who otherwise wouldn't be interested, leading to more reading of other books I can recommend without the caveats. Sentence structure is very simple and vocabulary is elementary, so it will be accessible to struggling readers. I'm so sorry that I can not recommend it with more enthusiasm.
(If anyone has read this far, I can unreservedly recommend Almost to Freedom by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, as a wonderful picture book for children that both sensitively and seriously introduces the concept of attempting to escape from slavery. I read it with my son when he was a kindergartener and felt that it really helped him understand both the imperative of hope and the drive to seek freedom while not minimizing the dangers.
Given that Girls Survive is literally the most popular series in my library that is not a graphic novel series (coming in just behind Dog Man, Baby-Sitters Club, I Survived Graphic, and Wings of Fire Graphic) I have been thrilled at the prospect of how well this new Girls Survive graphic series would circulate since I first heard there was going to be a Girls Survive Graphic series. But like the first two books in the series that I have read, Rosie and the Race Toward Freedom is extremely thin in terms of background, plot, character development, and historical context. The dialogue is simplistic and wooden and characters are not developed at all.
Still, I know my elementary readers would check this out, because the nexus of Virginia history and graphic novels in my library can't help but be popular...but this is where my greatest hesitation lies, because this depiction of freedom seekers from slavery is SO simplistic that it makes it seem like escaping from slavery was no big deal...figure out some code words, easily decipher a map, spend a night in a cellar, ford a couple of water crossings, hide during two questionings by slave catchers who were barely making an effort, sit down to a formal dinner at a dining table with a friendly white family, run onto a boat, and arrive in Philadelphia in 1859 to nearly instant happiness and freedom (despite the danger presented by the Fugitive Slave Act) and a quick reunion with two parents who traveled separately. The only slight hint of ongoing peril was in the fact that the main character and family chose to change their names, but they are excited about and proud of the new names they chose, so there is little sense of loss.
One could argue that a graphic novel for elementary readers can't get much more into detail or that young readers should be spared a sense of the terrible peril that real freedom seekers faced, including the family-shattering and often torturous punishments for unsuccessful attempts, but other books for an elementary audience manage a more complex story with much more detail...the Underground Abductor, about Harriet Tubman, in the Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales graphic novel series, Freewater by Amina Luqman Dawson, Unbound by Ann E. Burg, and even for a younger audience, Ranger in Time: Long Road to Freedom by Kate Messner. Picture books like Box: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom and The Daring Escape of Robert Smalls also come to mind as being completely appropriate for elementary audiences but having a strong sense of the gravity and danger involved in an attempt to escape enslavement.
In 2025, there are mounting and alarming efforts to whitewash the only recently told fuller truths about slavery in museums and National Park Service sites. Books like A Birthday Cake For George Washington deservedly received a huge backlash a decade ago for promulgating the myth of "happy slaves." But right now, government leaders are promoting PragerU animated videos for kids downplaying the horrors of slavery, like one that has a cartoon Frederick Douglass himself saying that slavery was a compromise that *benefitted* the country. Simplistic depictions of underground railroad stories, especially those that center white saviorism over Black self-emancipation, have long been problematic, not just for their centering of the (rare) story of white allyship, but more for the implication that running away wasn't all that difficult. After all, if slavery overall wasn't that bad, running away from slavery wasn't that difficult, lots of white people were standing at the ready to help freedom seekers, and the process of escaping involved only a few nights of discomfort and hiding, then...isn't that an implicit indictment of those who didn't successfully escape from enslavement, or never tried? It's, like, a polite Karen-nod of ostensible agreement that slavery was bad, but coupled with an eyebrow-raise and shoulder-shrug suggesting that, well, maybe people should just have bootstrapped themselves out of slavery with a small bit of gumption and if they didn't, well, it's their own fault.
With that context of what we are up against in terms of helping children have a full and accurate understanding that escape from slavery was RARE because the perils were SO high and the price of failure so catastrophic, the thinness of this story, the lack of character development, the seemingly easy and full happy ending (with the historically inaccurate sense that Philadelphia itself was truly safe in 1859) is problematic.
As I look back through its pages, it is clear that there is a real disconnect between the words by Dolores Andral, a Black author from Queens who wrote the excellent Athletes for Social Justice for kids, and the black and white illustrations of Soia di Chiara Manetti, an Italian artist. In SO many panels, the main characters' eyes depict curiosity and contentment and even joy, not terror or impending peril or sadness. One boy stepping on rocks for a river crossing has hands up in the air (rather than to the side for balance) and looks like he could be lightheartedly dancing across them. In another panel when the children are being assisted into hiding in a wagon, the adult Black wagon driver appears completely relaxed and nonchalant. In one panel when the main character talks about her father changing his name after he escaped to freedom (just days earlier) she holds a paper with the name PETER written on it with a huge beaming smile and wide eyes, as if she has just won an award she is proudly showing off...with no sense of the true feelings of grief, uncertainty, and worry that a young girl might feel not knowing if she would ever be reunited with either parent. I have appreciated this artist's illustrations of a couple of other Girls Survived illustrated chapter books before this, but in those, the pictures just illustrate the author's story; they don't carry at least an equal weight with the author in developing character, building plot, and communicating emotion. Given the vital importance to the storytelling of this graphic novel and the fact that more than half of the narrative is carried in pictures rather than words, the stark emotional incongruity of the illustrations is what most makes me unable to give Rosie an enthusiastic recommendation.
As a Virginia history geek, there is nothing unique to Virginia in the book at all...the illustrations have no sense of place, the opening plantation is nowhere specific, there is no map to show what their journey may have been, and the illustrated mass exodus of a running crowd of freedom seekers from woods to a boat leading to Philadelphia, with more boats of self-emancipated slaves arriving openly on the waterfront in Philadelphia each day, was nothing like I've ever read from historical accounts of typical escapes from Virginia. In terms of merit for developing a deeper understanding of Virginia history, there is little.
One page back matter about the Underground Railroad provides a brief explanation for some of the code words in the underground railroad network, the importance of sermons and spirituals for communicating messages to potential freedom seekers, and how the Fugitive Slave Act was part of the reason that some freedom seekers changed names even after reading a free state. A helpful one-page glossary in back defines words that may be unfamiliar, and this glossary earns my one unreserved bit of praise, for its definition of the word "enslaved", specifically, "people held involuntarily and forced under threat of violence or death to work without pay for the profit of another." That definition isn't sugarcoated or sanitized, but it is also fully appropriate for an elementary audience.
All that said, though...I probably will purchase this book for our library collection, as it *could* spark an interest in the topic in a child who otherwise wouldn't be interested, leading to more reading of other books I can recommend without the caveats. Sentence structure is very simple and vocabulary is elementary, so it will be accessible to struggling readers. I'm so sorry that I can not recommend it with more enthusiasm.
(If anyone has read this far, I can unreservedly recommend Almost to Freedom by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, as a wonderful picture book for children that both sensitively and seriously introduces the concept of attempting to escape from slavery. I read it with my son when he was a kindergartener and felt that it really helped him understand both the imperative of hope and the drive to seek freedom while not minimizing the dangers.
December 13, 2025
Solid, does-what-it-says on the tin. Strong on history but not on character development.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews