Winner of the 2013 Michael L. Printz Award
This is the story of "Shorty"-a 15-year-old boy trapped in a collapsed
hospital during the earthquake in Haiti. Surrounded by the bodies of the
dead, increasingly weak from lack of food and water, Shorty begins to
hallucinate. As he waits in darkness for a rescue that may never come, a
mystical bridge seems to emerge between him and Haitian leader Toussaint
L'Ouverture, uniting the two in their darkest suffering-and their hope.
A modern teen and a black slave, separated by hundreds of years. Yet in
some strange way, the boy in the ruins of Port au Prince and the man who
led the struggle for Haiti's independence might well be one and the same
. . .