Overground Railroad

"Overground Railroad is a book where you get the book and the CD to listen to together. I really like Lesa Cline-Ransome and James Ransome as an author and illustrator pair. They did Before She was Harriet last year, which was an Audie Award winner. They’re beautiful pictures, and they really did such a marvellous job making a soundscape that goes along with it. So you hear crickets as this little girl and her parents are getting ready to leave early in the morning and you hear the whistle of the train and the rustle of people getting settled in their seats. Even without the picture book, you know what’s happening in the story. It’s narrated by Shayna Small and Dion Graham. Shayna is voicing most of it as this little girl, Ruth Ellen. She and her parents are part of the overground railroad, which the author explains she learned about in Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns . It’s about people leaving the South and going north to get out of oppressive tenant farming contracts, or just trying to find a better place to live. “These are all books where the narrator does an amazing job of drawing you into the story” I loved that Shayna is so good at making this younger character really relatable. She’s excited and she’s nervous about moving and then, within the story too, she’s reflecting on what she sees as she’s going along on the train. She’s reading a book out loud to her mother about Frederick Douglass and so their stories sort of pair together. Dion Graham’s voice comes in as the conductor calling out all the stops along the way, so you also get that sense of momentum, moving forward through their journey and then, when they arrive in New York, how that feels, to be in the big city. It can be a tricky thing to adapt a picture book into audio, but they did it just right with this one. It’s a piece of history that is great to explore with children. It wasn’t only the Underground Railroad. In the US, there is also a long history of Black families needing to move and make their lives in new places. How did that feel? It’s set in 1939: I can see the date on the newspaper somebody is reading. As they move north, her family’s allowed to move from the colored car at the front, right behind the engine, to other parts of the train. The little girl, Ruth Ellen, is excited to be moving, but then these white passengers block them and don’t let them sit down. It’s a reflection of going from the South where there was segregation to the North, where in name there wasn’t segregation, but in action there certainly was. It’s a book that you would listen to with your kids and then talk through. I would say it’s for eight- or nine-year-olds, but younger readers too. Honestly, having little kids is a great excuse for looking at all these different books and reading them. I did a library science degree, so I had a lot of fun studying children’s books—and adult books—in that too."