Ah! Osceola! Hmm....quite impressive. Interesting story! As a Filipina-American, I know how important it is to define your cultural background...how our stories of struggles & successes help shape not only us but those we share it with...how so little can shape someone to have a strong mind! With the author & Ms. Mays both currently residing in Dallas, it makes me like the book even more. The illustrations are such Shane's style. Definitely Shane's style! The vibrant colors & unique style speak the hidden words of years past yet help you imagine you being in that exact spot done with the elegance of the proper era. I say, a book done with honors.....good job! Being based on a true story with some history behind it, it makes me enjoy this children's book even more without even seeing it as a children's book but more of a historical documentary. I like that! 2 thumbs up & a standing ovation! Osceola....wouldn't it be interesting to run into her or the author sometime in Big-D?

This book was beautiful, as are all of Pamela Jekel's books. Wonderfully researched. Basically a "true story of the Old South" with what it was really like. No spoiled plantation daughters primping around, but the story of escaped slaves and the Seminoles, before they were a mascot.

I just could not get into this book, I read at least 90 pages, and it just could not get interested in it.

I thought this was an incredibly uplifting story, very powerful.

The Author wove magic into the pages to tell a story of an Indian nations struggle for survival, intertwining with skill the love story of the fiercely proud and courageous "Chala" (aka. Wild Honey - raised from childhood by the Seminole Indians after her parents were killed by marauding Creek Indians) and Sloan MacAllister, white half-brother to the noble chief Osceola, who himself is on a crusade to save his half-brothers people from extinction...

The chemistry between Chala and Sloan sizzles.

I simply couldn't put it down!
This novel has made me hungry to read more of Fern Michaels.

The book moves swiftly through a tumultous period, and seems to stick to a historically accurate factual outline of the Seminole War in Florida. It is mostly an engrossing read.

This "historical novel" is probably more true than any of us would care to admit. We know that slaves and Indians were brutally treated throughout the period, and we know that the atrocities depicted continue to happen around the world to this day.

However, the fictionalized parts wallow in such unnecessarily graphic detail that the label "Pornography" comes to mind. It is disappointing because this book could have been so much better than it is - the explicitness is just jarring in places and generally seems forced and doesn't add to the compelling story.

I'd heard an interview with the deceased author's companion which led me to purchase the book. I planned when I finished it myself to encourage my 12-year-old to read it, since it is about a truly heroic figure. Now I just want to get the book out of the house. What a shame.

Knowing the friend of this author.she advised me that the author has sadly passed away,,,perhaps one day will be a movie..Lets get Joel Silver prod,to look into it...PERHAPS

I wanted to request a refund on the amount of money that had been wasted on this terrible piece of writing, but it was much more fun to use the book in building a fire. Wickman's research was padantic; obsessively detailed. However, there was no linear (or other) thinking involved in the final synthesis. In fact, having read the same research literature as Dr. Wickman had poured through, it is amazing to me that someone could write so many pages that are comprehensible only to people who have actually read the same research literature. Her writing evokes a rememberance of a criticism of Henry James (slightly reworded): "This author (not a writer) fills a much needed void." Let us pray that the Seminole Tribe of Florida will soon experience a void that once was occupied by this author. Osceola was a great War Chief, and a very interesting individual. Wickman's work does great injustice to both legacies.

If you're into reading heavy-handed college textbooks then this book is for you! Exhaustively researched and abstrusely (look that one up!) written, it makes Osceola's dynamic and fascinating life as exciting as stale crackers. The author even has the audacity to rate other researchers in the back. The research is exhastive and you will be too once you finish this book. It gave my dictionary a good workout tho!

I thought this work was marvelous. It's prodigiously and compassionately researched and written, exploring such varied facets of a single individual's life from what his parentage was (and how that may have shaped his identity,) what he wore (and how *that* may have shaped his identity,) the mistakes he made during his lifetime, who he might have been romantically involved with, and the disposition of his body after his death.

It's not a very theoretically-oriented text, but as a biography of the most famous Seminole who ever lived -- I though it made Osceola jump off the page. Only note of warning: this does contain a rather graphic couple of chapters on both Osceola's decapitation by his doctor immediately following his death and the exhumation of his corpse in the sixties. Sensitive readers should be aware of this.

BTW, Dr. Wickman is currently the Director of the Department of Anthropology and Geneaology at the Seminole Tribe of Florida, and was formerly the state of Florida's historian. I'm not saying this makes her unimpeachable as an historian, but I really do think she knows what she's talking about.