Two African-American boys tangle with slave catchers in this spellbinding children’s adventure, set in antebellum New York.

For 13-year-old Charlie Little and his baby brother David, life in the Five Points slum of Manhattan circa 1838 is full of boyish pleasures, like fishing for bluegill in the Hudson. But there are also deadly perils, chief among them the New York Kidnapping Club, a shadowy ring that abducts fugitive slaves—and even free blacks like Charlie and David—and spirits them off to bondage in the South. The Club works in cahoots with white gangs and a corrupt judge, but its leader is Snatch, a mysterious black man and master of disguise who befriends runaways and lures them into captivity. When the boys encounter a sailor named Freddie Johnson, they can’t tell whether he’s Snatch or a runaway who could be Snatch’s next victim. Evading their protective parents, the cautious Charlie and fearless David—assisted by foulmouthed Dirty Ida and her schoolgirl chums—head out into the night to try to save Freddie from a giant raid the Club is rumored to be plotting. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Fuller (A Soldier’s Story, 1981) presents an evocative, nightmarish vision of the Five Points demimonde, its tenement warrens teeming with vicious guard dogs, raucous slatterns, dead-eyed thugs who bite the heads off live rats, paramilitary gang rumbles and “evil, bawling hags who’ll dump garbage on your head and cackle afterwards like green witches.” The black community feels besieged by white hostility and the threat of the slave catchers, especially by the menace of Snatch: any of their number—Freddie, the school master, the old man hobbling by on a cane—might be the dreaded traitor. The author’s focus on the hijinks of Charlie, David and their plucky friends keeps the tone light enough for kids, who will enjoy the heroes’ exploits and the story’s colorful, boisterous setting. An edgy, atmospheric kids’ tale with some engaging history of black New York slipped into the excitement.

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I have read with sustained interest and profound enjoyment the novel SNATCH…

What I loved most about the book was the imaginative nicknames of the characters. For children, and adults, this is a good way to spark memory and to reinforce ideas….Of course, the research that went into the work, the discovery of games that were played, the activation of streets that have been forgotten, and characters that must have existed in old New York, were points that studded the work with brilliance…

I believe that anyone who reads this work will come away with an appreciation of the historical moment when our people banded together to take care of each other, to protect each other, and to assist in our collective well-being. Charles III and David must be very proud of their father, and all the children who read this story will know something about how we survived.

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I wanted to read your manuscript twice…it was worth it. As an elementary, and postsecondary reading teacher I think that SNATCH provides story elements that are critical to literal, inferential, and analytical reading comprehension and appreciation. It is a unique, authenticated piece of history retold from the perspective of a youngster.

The book has a rich vocabulary of dialect and traditional English grammar, its episodes are multi-layered and its characters are multi-faceted. There are no gender or age biases; young and old, male characters as well as young and old female characters are equally developed as likable human beings, or…disliked; leaving the reader free to like or dislike according to her/his own values.

In ‘Notes’ we are given a significant independent study guide or research tool. The notes inform and support the meticulous style of quality fiction writing.

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Snatch is just what the book doctor ordered, a genuine opportunity to create a duo of young urban heroes in an actual packed, historical thriller of societal significance in old school New York City. And Charles Fuller wrote it like a seasoned pro to keep the flow moving, just like young readers like it. So I did my part like a good father and passed the book over to my voraciously reading two sons, who make the perfect audience; young, hunger and adventure-ready.

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Snatch: The Adventures of David and Me in Old New York is historically rich and Dickensian in language and character. Charles Fuller displays his immense talent to place the Little family in a New York that few know but that everyone should understand. The book is populated by the real and the imagined, all of which blends together to recreate a world of luck, skill, grit, and danger. The struggle and triumph of Northern black families in the early 19th century is largely ignored, but considering the real threats they faced, especially in a free-for-all, survival-of-the-luckiest city like New York, is heroic beyond measure. Kidnapping free Northern blacks for the slave trade was a fact in New York, where the Kidnapping Club did its dirty work, and in other cities like Philadelphia, and the organized black effort to resist the long arm of the slave power—and greed—was just as much a reality. Fuller has got Five Points and the New York underworld just right and his street-level (and below) descriptions sent me running for a handkerchief and an air freshener. The Dead Rabbits, Black-Birders, Shirt-Tailers, and Roachies are sure to keep readers up at night, and the plot twist will satisfy because it is so utterly plausible. I only wish that historians could write with the skill and imagination of Charles Fuller.