"Chains" by Laurie Halse Anderson

316 pages

It's 1776. Twelve-year-old Isabel and her five-year-old sister, Ruth, are the slaves of a gentle elderly woman in Rhode Island. Their father was sold and taken to another state long ago, and their mother is dead. Their owner has promised that they'll be set free after she dies, but when she does, her will is lost and the sisters end up being sold to a cruel couple in New York City. There they find themselves in the middle of a city divided by the American Revolution. Isabel becomes friends with a young slave named Curzon who has ties to the Patriots, and he convinces her to spy on her owner, who is loyal to the King. Isabel thinks that helping the Patriots will help her and her sister obtain their own freedom, but she soon realizes that the situation is much more complicated than that.

There are a lot of books about slaves that are set during the Civil War, but I haven't seen many that take place during the Revolutionary War. This story highlights the irony of the fact that many of the men who sought their political freedom from the British enslaved human beings themselves. I'm not an expert on life during the Revolutionary War, but some of the details in the book didn't ring true to me, especially the dialogue. Other than that, I enjoyed "Chains." I got sucked into this story right away, and the characters really came to life to me. I think this is a great book for younger readers because it introduces the horrific atrocities of slavery and shows a side of the American Revolution that's sometimes overlooked without being terribly graphic.