Best Chapter Book REview Fifth Grade, Mr. Walker’s Class

BY JOURNEY STEPHENS

BOOK: The Laura Line by Crystal Allen

SUMMARY: Laura’s parents are going off to military training causing Laura to have to stay with her grandma farther out from where she lives.

Laura dreads going out to where her grandma lives because they don’t really have much in common and her grandma lives on her ancestors’ plantation, where they used to work. Her grandma says it has so much historical significance, but to Laura, it’s just a plantation where people got treated wrongly. People she is related to.

The main thing she despises about going to her grandma’s house is the slave shack on the property. It has many valuables from the family tree including a ledger from all the women named Laura in their family.

It just so happens that Laura’s grandmother is a good friend of Laura’s history teacher, and she wants the class to go visit the shack as a field trip. Laura is extremely embarrassed by the shack, and she already gets bullied a great deal on a regular basis.

The teacher gives Laura a chance to find her inner self and her true love for the slave shack by making her find one amazing thing about it. If she doesn’t find anything amazing about the shack, her class won’t go on the trip. She ends up finding that the first Laura in the Laura line was on the Amistad – a ship that carried 53 people from Sierre Leone in

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