I read this ages ago, I think when it first came out, but this reread as an adult I think revealed way more to me than I remembered. In some ways it reminds me a lot of Laurie Halse Anderson's Chains, a book that I adored when I read and which came out many years later; it shares a lot in the sense of being about an enslaved young person grappling with liberty during the American Revolution, and in depicting violence against enslaved people and the trauma of enslavement in subtle and nuanced ways. I would not say one is necessarily better than the other, though I remember being fairly confused by the beginning of this book as a kid, but that may have been from not being very good at reading.

I think one advantage of the book is it doesn't truck very heavily in nationalism or even in ideas of liberty (at least in this first book); it acknowledges that the "liberty" of the Revolution was a false idea/that there was a ruling class deeply invested in maintaining enslavement. We will see if that continues in the second book; I am definitely interested plot-wise in seeing how this shakes out, and what it looks like by the end!