By Colorado Kids Advisory Board member Cailey Salagovic

Title: Blackwater Ben
Author: William Durbin
Publisher: Wendy Lamb Books
Number of Pages: 197

Blackwater Ben by William Durbin was an awesome book!!! It's about a 13-year-old boy named Ben who lives in the mid 1800's. Ben goes to school just like you and me and absolutely hates it (maybe like you and me). He lives in a boarding house run by a sweet old lady named Mrs. Wilson who's been like a mother to Ben because his died when he was a baby. His father works as a cook at the Blackwater logging camp all day every day for most of the year so Ben doesn't see him much.

One spring Ben was telling his dad about a particularly bad day at school. Pa was as fed up with it as Ben was.
"I'm tempted to just take you to the logging camp with me." He said.
"Really?" asked Ben envisioning him self driving a four horse team pulling a massive pine to the river to be sent down stream to the mill.
"Yeah, you'd learn a whole lot more there than you would here." Pa said "Starting this winter you will be my new cookee at Blackwater logging camp." By that winter Ben had realized that he wasn't going to be a four horse teamster, he was a cookee.

The cooks and cookees were the first people at the camp and the last to leave. At first it was just Ben and Pa because Pa fired his last cookee because he left the maple syrup spigot open and pa slipped in it. To replace him Pa hired a cookee called Nathaniel Evers but he thought his name was to long so he just called him "Nevers". Ben and Nevers got to be good friends. They liked to go down to the bunk house, that's where the jacks sleep, and talk to the jacks who they have also grown to be pretty good friends.

The jacks loved to play tricks on each other. One day they played an especially nasty one on Ben and Nevers so to get back at them they put a bottle of castor oil in the beans and nailed the out house door shut. The jacks were pretty mad about that one but they agreed that they were even.

After every one got over the joke things went back to normal. The only step closer Ben got to his teamster dream was he now was responsible for diving the swingdingle, which is a sleigh that hauls lunch out to where the jacks are cutting. Ben realized that he couldn't even sign up to be a teamster till next winter and he figured that he would have a better chance of getting hired if he had the experience of driving all the logs that were cut this winter down the river to the mill during the spring. He told Nevers his idea and Nevers decided he wanted to drive logs too but they both knew that Pa probably wouldn't let him.

Finally the snow began to melt and the jacks began to leave. It was a bitter sweet end to the winter. Seeing all his new found friends leaving was a bit depressing to Ben but he kept his hopes to see then again next winter but this time as a teamster. Pa agreed to let him sign on as a log driver. And Ben knew he was that much closer to his dream.

I really enjoyed reading this book. I would recommend this book to any one older than third grade because all the lingo in it got a little confusing at times but it only made it feel more real. It was the kind of book that I was sad to see end. (March, 2004)