WHO’S SAYING WHAT IN JAMESTOWN, THOMAS SAVAGE?

Commemorating the 400th anniversary of Jamestown’s founding, Fritz’s latest venture into America’s past sketches the career of a teenaged cabin boy who joined the beleaguered colony at the beginning of 1608. He spent enough time in Powhatan’s settlement of Werowocomoco to learn the language, became an interpreter who survived the massacres and famines, then later went on to form an alliance with the neighboring Accawmackes and to settle on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Fritz notes that so little is known of Savage’s life that her account should be regarded as fiction. But she fills in the large gaps in the story with so many verified historical details of Jamestown’s tumultuous early years that readers will come away with an accurate picture of events—and also likely shaking their heads in wonder that the colony wasn’t utterly wiped out on numerous occasions. Though Comport’s low-angle illustrations have a distractingly flat, over-painted look, and the closing bibliography is composed of adult sources and hard-to-find journal articles, the narrative here is easily vivid enough to compensate. (Fictionalized nonfiction. 8-11)