John Brown's Mascot 
 There are three reasons to read this entertaining historical novel. It won the 2013 National Book Award, and it is always good to figure out what the judges were up to. It contains a lot of interesting information about lesser-known aspects of the abolitionist movement, especially the fighting between the Free Staters and the Pro-Slavers in Kansas Territory around 1856. And it is written in an infectiously cocky voice--that of Henry Shackleford, a mulatto boy who gets swept up by John Brown after his father has been accidentally killed in a fight. Although Henry is a mature man by the time he actually writes, he is only nine when his tale begins, and the irreverent attitude of youth colors everything. There has hardly been such an attractive narrator since Huck Finn. 
 Oh yes--Henry goes through the entire book as a girl. Since he is wearing a corn sack when he first sees him, John Brown mistakes his gender; and when his father protests (just before getting killed) "Henry ain't a--," Brown thinks he is saying his name, Henrietta. Now I am not quite sure why this deception has to be continued for the entire four-year span of the novel, although it does provide some amusement in the middle section when Henry finds work as a servant in a whorehouse, and has to avoid graduating to more characteristic employment. By this time (roughly the second quarter of a 400-page book), the headlong excitement of the opening has slacked off, and John Brown himself is out of the picture. He is a splendid creation, a grizzled, hard-praying, Bible-quoting, bloodthirsty fanatic who has been called (though not by McBride) America's first terrorist. But with him out of the way, the tension drops, and never quite takes hold again even in the second half, when Brown heads East for the failed but historically pivotal raid on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, one of the triggers of the Civil War. 
 More than once I was reminded of Devil's Dream, Madison Smartt Bell's portrait of a similarly charismatic maverick on the other side of the Civil War, Nathan Bedford Forrest. Both authors favor high color and the surprise of the unconventional. But Bell is politically and morally more complex, and in the end it was this that I missed about McBride. He writes a great adventure, but it feels like one, more in the manner of Stevenson or Rider Haggard. It does not have much to say as the prelude to the most morally divisive schism in American history.