The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
Fiction

This farcical historical fiction begins one afternoon when the abolitionist crusader John Brown rides into town;  by that evening the 11 year old slave boy named Henry is orphaned, kidnapped (or set free) and mistaken for a girl. Henry adjusts easily to life as a girl because "a damsel out west on the trail could spit, chaw tobacco, holler, grunt, and fart, and gather no more attention to herself than a bird would snatching crumbs off the ground.” Only other black people look at him closely enough to suspect that he is isn’t really a girl. Unable to correct the gender error, for the next few years Henry travels with Brown’s raiding party as Brown’s good luck charm, dubbed “little Onion.” He lives for a time in a Missouri brothel and falls in love with a prostitute, meets a courageous slave girl who dies for freedom, and accompanies Brown on countless raids as well as fundraising trips where he meets Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman. Larger-than-life characters and boisterous adventure contrast with tragic situations and clashing passions in this unusual look at events (real and imagined) leading up to the start of the Civil War. Winner of the 2013 National Book Award.