num_pages: 152
description: A fast-moving middle-grade novel set in the seventeenth century about two Portuguese orphans who are sent to Brazil where they encounter slaves from Africa. Together with their new friend an aboriginal boy they work towards reuniting the slaves with their families and helping them escape to freedom. The novel opens when Bento is wrongly thrown into Lisbons prison by the kings guards leaving his younger sibling Manu to fend for himself. Fortunately a noblemans family helps to reunite the siblings  although they will have to lead a life of exile in Brazil. They keep secret the fact that Manu is a girl in disguise so that she will be able to accompany her brother aboard ship. The story shifts to the African savannah where a young boy Odjigi is hunting gazelle with his father and other men. But the hunters soon become the hunted  they are kidnapped by slave traders as are the women and children of the village marched to the sea shut up in dark airless huts to prepare for the voyage across the Atlantic and then undergo the horrifying trip itself. In Brazil the siblings quickly adapt to their new lives but they are shocked by the existence and treatment of African slaves. Manu befriends an aboriginal boy Caiubi and a slave Didi who has been separated from his father. Meanwhile Bento falls in love with Rosa a beautiful young slave who is also searching for her family. When Manu learns from Caiubi that escaped slaves have formed quilombos  villages hidden deep in the forest where they live in freedom  she is determined that they must help Didi and Rosa escape.
language: English
title: Until the Day Arrives
publisher: Groundwood Books