Doll Hospital #03: Glory's Freedom: A Story of the Underground Railroad

This book is awesome. 5 stars all the way. It tells you about the underground railroad . In this book Rose and Lila are with thier far nana and she tells them a story about a doll named Glory. This book is as great as the first 2. I am reading it for the second time. I recommend it to girls who like history and dolls.Read this book to find out more.

This is our favorite book in the Doll Hospital series. It's a tie with our other favorite in the series, #1 Tatiana Comes to America. They're all amusing and historically informative--we've read them all more than once by now.

When a plantation-owner's daughter named Arabella gets a beautiful wax doll from England, she scorns it because it's not the exact doll she wants. May, a slave girl, likes the doll and helps name it Glory. When May gets in trouble for back-talking another plantation owners' daughter, she must escape on the Underground Railroad. For reasons I won't give away here, we discover that the doll is in danger and must escape too. They travel together in a manner devised by May. The doll winds up hidden in a house for over a hundred years. When she's discovered she is finally able to tell the world about May's journey. Along with this historic story we also hear the story of Rose and Lila and their grandmother, who runs a doll hospital. By watching the repair of Glory, we learn how a wax doll might be repaired and we hear about Rose and Lila's growing friendship with a neighbor girl. The humor in this book is subtle, but really great. My girls now say "Up and Adam" to wake each other up. If you've read this book, you'll get that. The conversation between the various dolls is witty. We have read all 3 Doll Hospital books together. This is our favorite so far. Good humor, good tension, great story! Excellent!

When Rose and Lila's parents go to Africa for a year, for their work as doctors, Rose(age 10) and Lila(age 8) must stay with their maternal grandmother,whom they hardly know. As they snoop through her house (Book 1), they soon discover that "Far Nana" has a few secrets worth knowing. "Far Nana" runs a doll hospital from her home and has the intuitive skill of listening to the stories of the dolls she repairs. She tells these stories to the girls in the first person, from the point of view of the doll. In these books, the reader is reading the ongoing story of Rose and Lila's adjustments to living with their grandmother and the historical story of a doll, in a story-within-a-story format.In "Glory's Freedom" the girls hear the story of a wax doll, owned by a girl on a Southern plantation, who escapes the heat of the coming summer in the arms of girl running away from slavery. I found Glory's story to be a captivating lesson in history, slavery, and friendship told with characters that children will relate to.In Lila and Rose's story, they learn about auctions by attending a doll auction with their grandmother. They take this experiential knowledge of auctions and quickly relate it to the slave auctions they hear about in Glory's story. The girls' become further interested in Glory's story and have a chance to talk to her current owner about the unusual way Glory was found and they find a story that must be told. The reading level for this book is for grade 3. I would not recommend this series for readers younger then 6 years of age because the intertwining stories may be confusing. A paper doll is included in each book, which may be of added interest to some readers.