Latest Fiction: Blue-Eyed Slave

In 1761 Charles Town, Hannah Cardozo, daughter of a prominent Jewish family, embarks on a mysterious delivery to an unfamiliar address. The destination turns out to be Harry’s School, founded in 1740 despite the stringent laws against teaching slaves to read. When Hannah meets Headmaster Harry, enslaved himself, he recruits her to tutor a spirited girl about Hannah’s age named Bintu. This young woman has been recently stolen from her native Senegambia and, having survived the Middle Passage, was bought by the cruel Hartes upon her arrival in Charles Town.

Harry’s School begins to feel the pressure as political winds shift and the Stamp Act causes revolt, uproar, and armed protests. Caught in the crossfire of impending revolution and increased animosity towards an educated enslaved population, Harry—and ultimately the two girls—will find their faith and integrity sorely tested.

With relentless attention to historical accuracy, Blue-Eyed Slave levels an unflinching gaze at the cruelties of enslavement and shows that although human cruelty may be universal, the same is true for kindness and bravery.

HOLD FAST: A BOY’S LIFE ALOFT

It is 1761 off the coast of Italy, and 13-year-old Joseph Carlos and his cousin have just been kidnapped by the British Navy and impressed into service on the Deptford, a British man-of-war. Just the day before the two boys were happily sailing with their uncle on a routine merchant passage, dreaming of owning their own ship one day and returning home to the warmth and safety of their family.

What was supposed to be a “punishment” for a childish misadventure turns into a fight for survival on foreign seas. The boys have to rely on each other as they struggle with a new world of unfathomable rules and codes, near-death floggings, lethal storms, and intrigue. Their endurance depends not only on their own bravery and stamina but on how fast they can learn English. For the next two years the ship becomes their prison, their classroom, and their home. Eventually, Joseph Carlos has to make a choice that shapes what kind of person he becomes.

‘SPARE PARTS’ BY MARSHALL HIGHET

As creatures from different worlds, Tesla and Lynx should never have met. The A-ones and Underdwellers don’t mix in the Dome, but Tesla is no ordinary A-one. She isn’t afraid to question everything.

Her entire life, she had been taught that the Underdwellers lacked the basic capacity to love or understand the high moral ground of loyalty. Something in her always questioned the absolute truth of this kind of prejudicial thinking. Then, quite by accident, she witnesses something that shakes her already shaky faith in these beliefs. Captivated, she watches Lynx, an Underdweller, defend a friendan act she was told was impossible for these brutish creatures. In that moment, she knows that she doesn’t know the truth. Tesla saves Lynx from certain death and, in a moment of inspiration and fear, asks him for a favor that puts them both in danger. It’s a favor that could be the undoing of the Dome itself.

“And THAT’S THE WAY OF IT” BY BIRD JONES

All too often, local histories are dry, bare-bones accounts that tell us who the selectmen were from 1794 to the present and when the first school was built but ultimately leave us saying, “So what?” If we want the flesh and blood and the pulse of life, if we want to meet the pillars of the community, the black sheep, and everyone in between, we need stories, yarns, anecdotes, and just what ninety-five-year-old Sheepscot native Dorothy Carney Chase gives us in these reminiscences of her home village lovingly and diligently recorded here by Bird Stasz. —ROBERT KIMBER, author of Upcountry: Reflections from a Rural Life and A Canoeist’s Sketchbook, and contributor to A Place on Water: Essays 

“This little book is the outgrowth of a series of interviews with ninety-five-year-old Dorothy Carney Chase of Sheepscot, Maine… she is a gifted narrator and storyteller, her “take” is clear and unsentimental, and blessedly her interviewer knew how to ask the right questions, all of which makes for an interesting and readable book. Highly recommended. —SANDY IVES, founder and former director of the Maine Folklife Center 

Preview “And That’s The Way Of It” in this audio interview with Dorothy Carney Chase:

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