For the first time, when reading about the 'discovery' of America, the Wampanoag people feel like real people. Coombs weaves this story to connect readers with Wampanoag youth, giving them somebody to relate to, allowing readers to better understand the true story of America. Well done, authentic voice telling an excellent (and important) story.

This is a great middle grade read for students learning about colonization and the negative effects of it on Native American peoples. I loved the setup with this book first offering a definition and introduction about racism that then went into the story starting with life before Europeans showed up.
This book has plenty of sub sections and photos to keep a reader engaged and on track. Every chapter starts with a summary of what that chapter will be about including years and basic information for students to wrap their heads around before getting to details. There is a Q&A style to this book that I think will make it really effective for students to read and be concentrated on.

An interesting read.
I like that it offers the story of the native inhabitants of the Northeast. But while explaining some aspects, it doesn’t give any definitions of some words young readers may not be familiar with, assuming they would know.
There are also two tenses used: when describing the native life, the present tense is used, but then the past tense is used for all the other narration.
The book has its scope, but it offers a glimpse of life for the original people of America.

I love the idea behind this series but the actual storytelling is repetitive and uninteresting. I wanted to really learn something, but it didn't feel like that was the purpose? Maybe it is better as just a story that kids could put themselves into to gain insight and empathy.

A mix of fictionalized history and non-fiction, Colonization and the Wampanoag Story sets the record straight with what information we have about early colonization and the way it has been presented vs. the way it really happened. This was a good balance of difficult truth mixed with a narrative of what one tribal experience may have been like pre-colonization. The book is written for young readers, and while many of the events are difficult to read about, Linda Coombs handles this with thoughtful exploration and discussion questions.

This would be a great resource for school and homeschool, as readers are invited to share their thoughts and reflect on what they have learned. I highly recommend this book for schools and libraries.

This book presents three parts throughout. There is a third-person story narrative of several characters including Little Bird, Strawberry and Punkinseed and others. Sadly, the characters are not well developed. The story centers around the growing seasons and includes a lot of description of planting, harvesting, and general way-of-life. The second part of the book includes historical background about English settlers on the East coast of the US and the Wampanoag people's encounters including the Christian views of oppression and superiority that drove laws and mistreatment of the native people. Each of these informational chapters ends with a third part entitled "Let's Think About This" consisting of about one page of questions for readers to grapple with based on the presented text. There are pictures and some photos throughout, and I was quite curious about what looked to be some staged photos of Settlers and Wampanoag people but there were no photo credits. The target audience may understand that there were no cameras in the 1600s, but why not be clear about that with citations or caption info? The version I read here at NetGalley also had no back matter, so will this book have an index, bibliography, further recommended reading? Can't tell.

Overall, I cannot recommend this book. Much as we need books that give accurate portrayals of Native culture and the struggles that came with white settlement, this book tells the reader instead of showing the reader. It will not be of use to most educators either.

This book alternates between informative chapters about the colonization of what is now New England and a story about the native peoples before contact with Europeans, and how they lived with the land. This book would be wonderful to share with upper elementary students, reading aloud the narrative chapters accompanied by the informational chapters, and would spark great discussions. I do wish that the narrative chapters did not use so many exclamation points. They could cut them down by half, simply replacing with a period, and the story would sound less amateur.. It would also be helpful to cite their sources. Overall, an excellent resource to add to history studies, which shows a more complete picture of what happened in our country.

Provides indigenous context for the typical white-washed narrative of the New World colonists. Excellently done. A must purchase for all libraries, school and public, especially those that need more balanced collections.

This is a great book that really will pair well with Kate Messner's History Smashers series, although this is more serious. I do like that this book touches on parts of colonization that are often glossed over and explore in more detail but is easier to understand. This really gives a new perspective on a part of history that hasn't been covered before. I look forward to more in this series.

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book before publication. Overall, I’d probably rate this book at about a 3.5- I really struggled to decide how I felt about this book because there were parts that were absolutely fantastic and thoroughly researched and then there were other parts that sounded very clunky, grew repetitive, or were worded in a way that cast a less than professional tone — perhaps some phrasing was meant to relate to middle grade readers more than adults, but some of the more casual phrases, comments, and verbiage came across as messy in comparison with the rest of the passages. I LOVED the focus on the Wampanoag life apart from English influence so that the reader was able to get a glimpse into pre-colonial indigenous culture, societal structures, economics, agriculture, and legal systems. Though, at first, the bouncing between a fictionalized story about a Wampanoag family during the course of a year in their lives and an almost textbook style history of colonization seemed jarring as the first time it happened, the historical text passage seemed to jump right past the initial contact in 1620 and fully into English abuses, and then went back to the historical fiction where the village had no knowledge of the English. Over the course of the book, I appreciate the juxtaposition between the two, but it could be hard for a middle schooler to follow without concerted effort. I did like the questions posed at the end of each section that caused the reader to think critically about the content they’d just read, but again, it read more like a textbook or a teacher trying to elicit a particular response - albeit legitimate. As a librarian, I’m not really sure how you’d catalog this book because it’s both historical fiction and nonfiction…. And while I read an advanced copy, I saw no citations and references, which is a bit concerning as about half of the book is nonfiction. I’m hoping that will be corrected at publication. The historical content was correct, but the citations are needed for credibility-sake. Overall, I’m glad I read it, and I’d certainly recommend it to some students and teachers, but the style would be hard to follow for some readers.