Very well-written but extremely depressing story of a young black girl set during the American revolutionary war. Stories about slavery are never going to be happy ones - slavery is simply too horrible for that - but they're worth reading nevertheless, and this is a time period that I haven't seen covered before.

When I do read a book about slavery in the US, it seems to be set during the civil war, so this was new ground for me. And new history, which is both disappointing and fantastic at once. The latter because I like learning new things, and the former because what's learned is really pretty awful. There are very few good characters in this (by that I mean characters who act like decent people). Isabel, her little sister Ruth, Isabel's friend Curzon... that's pretty much it. Everyone else is varying degrees of awful. And what Anderson makes clear - what I'll be taking away more than anything else from this book - is that the awfulness was widely present on both sides. Both the Americans and the British had their own approaches to slavery during the war, and neither of them had the interests of people like Isabel at heart. She's betrayed by all sides, repeatedly, and the hypocrisy of the conflict around her - the desire for freedom for some and not others - is made very, very plain. There is a happy-ish ending, which I will not spoil, and I understand some sequels exist. Though to be honest I don't care about the sequels. I just wanted to see Mrs. Lockton get hers. Alas, it's probably more realistic that consequences felt by monsters like herself are few. But damn it all, there are times I don't want realism and would rather have deserving characters burnt alive in their beds. It'd only be justice.