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From School Library Journal

Grade 6 Up–Racing away from home on his bike to avoid being dragged to another embarrassing visit with his imprisoned father, a South Florida middle schooler is hit by a car and swept into this time-travel thriller. Ryan faces a number of narrow escapes and gradually comes to accept that he has been recruited by Hezekiah, an elderly African-American Legal Eagle, to succeed him. Hezekiah uses leapholes in conjunction with law books to travel back in time to meet the people behind the cases that have established precedent, good or bad, and that determine our current legal environment. What's not to like about a book that says, Nowhere is the imagination less constrained than in a library and that incorporates lawyer jokes? Unfortunately, weak characterization and circumstantial plot make this novel less appealing for sophisticated teen readers. A portion of the story involves Dred Scott v. Sandford, and the author has to explain abolition and the Underground Railroad to a clueless Ryan, even though he has studied the Civil War. Extensive end matter includes responses from 19 famous lawyers about why they entered the profession. Fans of Horowitz might bite on this, but not of Grisham.–Joel Shoemaker, Southeast Junior High School, Iowa City, IA
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From the Publisher

On April 19, 1841, the American ship William Brown hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic while en route from Liverpool to Philadelphia. It was loaded with Irish emigrants. Roughly half the passengers went down with the ship, and the rest piled into two lifeboats. The boat commanded by the first mate was so badly overloaded that it began to sink. In the face of crashing waves and a driving rainstorm, the first mate in utter desperation ordered his crew to lighten the load. Twelve men and two women were thrown overboard and drowned at sea. When the survivors finally reached land, one of the crewmen who had thrown passengers overboard faced criminal charges. It was undisputed that the lifeboat would have sunk and all would have perished if it had remained in its overloaded state. However, the American judge who decided the prisoner's fate wrote that the passengers should have cast lots to determine who should live and who should die. This opinion sparked sharp debate among jurists and legal scholars. Some believed that casting lots was fair, almost an appeal to God. Others believed that casting lots was effectively "playing God," a practice that dehumanized all of us. The case of The William Brown has fascinated me since law school. It presents the ultimate survival dilemma -- to save ourselves or to save others. That dilemma is a theme that runs throughout Leapholes. Eleven-year-old Ryan Coolidge is forced to confront that issue head on. But he does it in a way he had never imagined he would. Ryan encounters a magical lawyer who puts a new spin on time travel -- a lawyer with the power of legal "leapholes," the power to bring to life the people behind famous legal decisions like The William Brown. All of the cases woven into the Leapholes storyline are actual cases from American legal history. The case of The William Brown is reported at United States v. Holmes (1842). The Supreme Court's decision that slaves are property, not people, appears at Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). The slave doctrine that "the brood follows the dam" was embraced by the U.S. Supreme Court in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842). I've tried to present these and other snippets of legal history in a way that makes for exciting reading. Hopefully, it will provoke thoughtful discussion, not only about the law, but also about the people whose lives were affected by the thousands of reported decisions in our law libraries. It's a fun way to discover that legal precedents are not just words on paper. They are about real people with real problems. And for many, the law was a matter of life and death.