Lightning's Run

January 20, 2014
How can Hiram follow his family’s nonviolent ways when a bully keeps beating him up? That’s the challenge for the 17-year-old Jewish immigrant living in 1870s New York City in this story, which helps launch the Bareknuckle series. Hiram sneaks out to the Woodrat Club, where he watches bareknuckle boxing and eventually trains with one of the champs, an ex-slave named Lightning. Issues of race, tolerance, and assimilation are skillfully threaded through this vibrant and gritty account. The strong friendship between Hiram and Lightning forms a solid core around which the realistic fighting action can bob and weave. Simultaneously available: The Giant by Jonathan Mary-Todd, Fighter’s Alley by Heather Duffy Stone, and The Big Fix by Nathan Sacks. Ages 11–up.

July 1, 2014
Set in a nineteenth-century NYC Bowery underground boxing club, these fast-paced and involving hi-lo novels--filled with fight action, intrigue, adventure, and a multiethnic cast of characters--starkly portray the social, political, and economic realities of the period and place. There are recurring secondary characters, but each book's unique central character drives the plot and resolves the story's conflicts. Compelling, reluctant-reader-friendly historical fiction.

(Copyright 2014 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)