Cast Two Shadows: The American Revolution in the South

by Ann Rinaldi

Overview

A girl flees her plantation to find her injured brother and bring him home: “Impeccably researched, vividly detailed…filled with very human characters.”—Booklist (starred review)
 
In Camden, South Carolina in 1780, the Revolutionary War has arrived, and fourteen-year-old Caroline is feeling the pressure. Her father is in prison. Her brother is off fighting for the Loyalists. And she, her mother, and her sister are confined to just a single room in their spacious plantation house as a British colonel occupies the rest.
 
But even a British colonel can’t stop Caroline when she learns that her brother has been injured. She rushes to his aid, taking along her “secret” grandmother—a slave on her family’s plantation. But along the way, the two will encounter trigger-happy soldiers and desperate rebels, and Caroline will find her world turned upside down…
 
Named a New York Public Library “Book for the Teen Age,” Cast Two Shadows is a “deftly plotted and fast-paced” historical adventure (School Library Journal).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547351155
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/01/2000
Series:	Great Episodes
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Lexile:	610L (what's this?)
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

About the Author

ANN RINALDI is an award-winning author best known for bringing history vividly to life. A self-made writer and newspaper columnist for twenty-one years, Ms. Rinaldi attributes her interest in history to her son, who enlisted her to take part in historical reenactments up and down the East Coast. She lives with her husband in central New Jersey. 

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

[star] "Impeccably researched, vividly detailed, and filled with very human characters."
—Booklist

Editorial Reviews

Skeletons come and go from a wealthy South Carolina family's closet when the British army arrives in this tale set during the Revolutionary War. While sister Georgia Ann has taken to dining nightly with haughty Lord Rawdon, Caroline Whitaker, 14, scorns the occupying officer; she has seen a friend hanged and her Patriot father thrown into prison. Word comes that brother Johnny, a member of the Loyalist militia, has been wounded, so Caroline and her "negra" grandmother, Miz Melindy, set out to bring him home. Caroline not only learns that Johnny has switched sides, but that her birth mother, Miz Melindy's daughter, didn't die (as she had always been told); she was shipped off to the West Indies as the price of Caroline's acceptance as a Whitaker. Deftly incorporating facts into the background but leaving most of the violence offstage, Rinaldi (Mine Eyes Have Seen, 1998, etc.) keeps the focus on her characters, developing an entertainingly contentious rapport between Caroline and Miz Melindy while strewing the cast with rough men and widowed or abandoned women. Georgia Ann eventually becomes Rawdon's doxy, then is summarily dropped from the story, and Johnny, willing to risk his life to save his slave, breaks off with the Catawba women he had been seeing for years in the name of appearances. In the end, Caroline has no trouble marrying into a white family, a seeming paradoxþconsidering the pervasive consciousness of racial differences hereþthat Rinaldi doesn't explain. Anna Myers's Keeping Room (1997), a less disingenuous story set in the same place and time, offers a more direct view of the unusual brutality that characterized the war in the Carolinas. (bibliography)(Fiction. 12-15)

Kirkus Reviews

"Rinaldi's books are always impeccably researched, vividly detailed, and filled with very human characters; they are also about something that matters."—Booklist
"An authentic setting, realistic dialogue, and believable characters in a suspenseful novel that is difficult to put down."—The Alan Review
"A deftly plotted and fast-paced novel."—School Library Journal
"Rinaldi's fans will scoop this up."—The Bulletin
—

From the Publisher