Suffers from too many points of view. And I co-sign ImperfectCJ's review. ( )

I'm not sure where to start with this one. I read the first 90-odd pages then skimmed the rest after the historical inaccuracies and numerous small mistakes started getting to me too much.

This is a selection for the Level 12 Build Your Library curriculum my eldest is using this year, and it's the first that's left me totally disappointed. I appreciate the author's intention to bring attention to Margaret Morgan whose life and whose children's lives were shaped by a US Supreme Court case in the 1830s but whose own story has been ignored and largely lost by history, but McCann's execution could have been better.

Some problems I noted within the first 90 pages:
-Multiple small-ish errors, like:
-"mantle" instead of "mantel" for the shelf over a fireplace,
-"stillborn" as two words instead of one, and
-chickens living in a "coup" (which gave my children and I a laugh cotemplating a chicken uprising).
-The narrator refers to the many roles her home had served, including a hospital in which to birth children, but in the 1830s, no one gave birth in a hospital, so it is highly unlikely she would have made this comparison.
-The narrator removes her "brassiere" but a quick Internet check confirms that the bra wasn't invented until 1869 at the earliest and the word "brassiere" wasn't coined until 1907.

These are relatively small things, but when I see mistakes like this, I always wonder what other historical errors I'm missing.

Combine this with the uncomfortable use of dialect and the general misgivings I have about a white woman writing from the perspective of a Black woman in the antebellum United States, and I don't find this book worth the time it would take to give the whole thing a close read.

In lieu of this novel, I think I'm going to have my daughter read Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe's novel is problematic in its own ways, but it's contemporary to the period, a Classic by many measures, and it had a significant influence on Northern opinions about slavery in the lead-up to the Civil War and so has historical significance of its own. I think she and I would do better to discuss the many issues in Stowe's novel than in this one. ( )

I loved the ending. The only thing that would have made it better was if she found the boys. I skipped the rape scenes. ( )

I received this book several years ago as part of the Early Reviewer program, but I failed to write a review.

I can't say much since I don't remember the details, but I do recommend it. ( )

Very good read. Jessica McCann wove a story of a free woman and her three children being torn from her free husband/father by a slave bounty hunter. Margaret and her daughter, Emma, are bought in an auction after Margaret watches her two young sons being bought by two different men. The story focuses on Margaret and Emma and how they finally escape. ( )