NightJohn

 NightJohn is a story about a slave named Sarny who meets a man named NightJohn. The story starts out getting to know Sarny and the woman who takes care of her. When NightJohn is first introduced he is being taken into the plantation by their master with many scars on his back. They don't actually talk to each other until the next night when he asks for tobacco for trade. Sarny has a piece of a tobacco leaf and offers it to NightJohn because she really wanted what he was offering. He was offering reading lessons. Well, he was only offering to teach the letters A B and C but as time went on he ended up teaching her more letters. The first word that she learned was "bad" but was soon caught writing the word on the floor and had to be punished. She gave an excuse that she was drawing so instead of her being punished the master decided to punish his "mother" because he thought that she had something to do with it. Hm, wonder what happened next.

 The genre of NightJohn is Historical Fiction. I can tell it's Historical Fiction because it isn't a real story and it is based on a historical event when slavery was legal. The book doesn't really go into the historical slavery details but it does mention a few things like how they were punished and what they would do if a slave ran away. It's kind of a short book but it isn't a book you'd give to a child at that reading level.