The story of the Logan family continues with a nail-biting episode that begins with the unjust execution of one boy and ends with the search for another who has run away, not fleeing his family but looking for a job to support it. The horrors of racist persecution are countered in these books by the anchor of a warm, loving family that owns their own land -- but that ownership is constantly under threat by the rapacious white neighbor, and in this book even the security of familial love is shaken under the stress of trauma. It is hard to read about, but how much harder was it to live through? Situations such as these, as well as a mixed-race child choosing to pass as white when she can, are given an individual  human face. Though Taylor is using such characters to call readers' attention to the cruelty and injustice of the world they live in, they never feel like cardboard characters for her to hang a lesson on, but have their own life that pulls us in emotionally. I'm sorry it took me so long to start this series, which was all the rage when I was a child (Roll of Thunder won the Newbery as I entered grade school), but glad I'm encountering it now, when we need its message so desperately. It still holds up today.