Hazel

by Mary White Ovington

The trials of a young Boston black girl spending a winter in Alabama at the turn of the century.

162 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

Reviews

[Cara Byrne · Rating 2 out of 5]

A classic work that is important when reading the history of middle grade children's literature, though it is not very entertaining beyond this. In the short chapter book, Hazel Tyler is a little girl with a bright imagination and a passion for biblical stories, whose mother is a gifted seamstress and whose “dear, dear” father has recently past away. Throughout the work, Ovington tells a collection of short stories about Hazel’s joys and poverty, with an emphasis on Hazel’s kindness and charity as she moves to Alabama to care for her paternal grandmother. The story is largely bland and uneventful. In Brown Gold, scholar Michelle Martin states that Hazel “offered a more complex and positive representation of black children during this time” but the book was a novel “that targeted older child readers” (39). The book can be read in its entirety here: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id...

[Mary Grace McGeehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

For Black History Month, I looked into whether there were any children’s novels a hundred years ago that featured African-American characters. This book, written by a progressive white woman, turned out to be the only one. The story of a middle-class Boston girl who is sent to stay with her grandmother in Alabama, it turned out to be not just a fascinating historical artifact but a great read, full of adventure and friendship and adversity and humor and all the things a children’s book should have. I wrote more about Hazel on my blog here: https://myyearin1918.com/2019/02/27/t....