Booktalk

It ought to be a pretty easy task to identify "the good guys and the bad guys" when talking about the American Revolutionary War, but Laurie Halse Anderson reminds us in Chains just how illusionary the moral high-ground can be; especially from the perspective of a slave.

This is a story about a young slave negotiating a harrowing life in a Tory household of New York City at the onset of the Revolutionary War. The city is a place of suspect alliances, an untried colonial army, quartered British soldiers, and always the cruel realities of slavery for whom the "revolution" did not promise freedom. The texture and sounds and smells of that world are alive on the page.

It is the thread of a life that Anderson entwines through that world, however, that bring both to life. With a smattering of "betwixt" and "rememories" to salt the language to the times, Anderson yet depends on her clear and urgent prose to bring the devastating brutalities of slaves (and patriot-prisoners!) to life in the person of young Isabel.

Chains is a powerful confluence of storytelling and history. It portrays the reality of the times as well as the resiliency and the depravity of the human spirit. That it poses as many provocative questions for its readers as it does revelations is what made it memorable to me.