The Good Lord Bird

The memoirs of Henry Shackleford, a fictional enslaved boy in Kansas during the Bleeding Kansas era, are discovered in a Delaware church. Henry, nicknamed "Little Onion" for eating a particularly rancid onion, accidentally encounters abolitionist John Brown in a tavern. Brown mistakes Henry for a girl and gives him a dress to wear; Shackleford wears a dress for much of the novel. The two join together, and Henry narrates his encounters with Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and the events at John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. The book is narrated in the first person through Henry.

In a review for the Los Angeles Times, Héctor Tobar called the novel "laugh-out-loud funny and filled with many wonderfully bizarre images", but noted the lack of humanity in comparison to Huckleberry Finn or Middle Passage (1990).^[1]

Tobar went on to say "those looking for verisimilitude or gravitas in their historical fiction might want to avoid The Good Lord Bird."^[2] Laura Miller of Salon drew comparisons between the novel and Huckleberry Finn, specifically comparing the moral awakening of Finn to the journey of Henry; writer Christine Brunkhorst notes how Onion and Finn both encounter "drunken rebels, brutal slave owners, spineless men, clairvoyant women, crooked judges and some brave and principled people."^[3][4] In a review for the San Francisco Chronicle, novelist Amity Gaige praised McBride's "reimagining" of Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and added that he "[managed] to novelize real historical events without dreary prostrations to the act".^[5]

The novel won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2013.^[6] National Book Award judges called McBride "a voice as comic and original as any we have heard since Mark Twain."^[7] McBride did not prepare an acceptance speech, as he thought he would not win, and was described as "clearly stunned" upon receiving the award.^[8]

Ethan Hawke and Jason Blum adapted the book for a television show, which premiered on October 4, 2020, on Showtime.^{[14][15][16][17]}