When it comes to background research, Anderson has clearly and commendably done her work. Intent on gaining his own freedom as much as that of the colonies, he endures - with the help of poor white friends, in the face of evil slave-holding gentry and despite the petulance of Isabel, his romantic interest, with whom he is dramatically reunited when both are re-enslaved. Valley Forge has forever been linked with Thomas Paine’s question about whether the rebel would prove to be merely “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot.” Here, Curzon supplies an answer. A handful of rice the next day is cause for celebration. Dinner was firecake and water,” Curzon reports one day in December 1777 - firecake was flour baked on stones.

Curzon is not only a freed slave returned to bondage, but a new recruit in the Continental Army during that winter’s freezing cold and constant hunger. But what continues is the close, internal voice of an abused narrator. Curzon is another slave and a boy who captured Isabel’s interest in “Chains.” The scene changes too, from a besieged New York to the winter encampment of Valley Forge. Her life is one of constant pain from whippings, branding, imprisonment and other forms of mistreatment.Ī new narrator appears in “Forge” (the second book in an anticipated trilogy). In “Chains,” significant events involving the Tories and the patriots unfold in the background while the voice of Isabel, a slave, commands our attention the commotion outside enters her consciousness only as “buzzing.” On the inside, however, Isabel is screaming. Anderson (no relation) - the link between the freedom of the colonies and the freedom of slaves, the double-dealing and hypocrisy of both the American colonists and the British - they are different in scale the two volumes of “Octavian Nothing” are encyclopedic and magisterial, whereas “Chains” and “Forge” are conspicuous for their almost claustrophobic narrative voices. While her books take up some of the same themes as the “Octavian Nothing” novels of M. The specter of full-grown adults festooned in tricorn hats may have retreated in the post-Tucson landscape, but the American Revolution and its reputed lessons are still in the air, making this an interesting time for Laurie Halse Anderson to publish “Forge,” her new novel about the Revolution and colonial-era slavery, and a sequel to her prize-winning “Chains.”

Forge laurie halse anderson