After Isabel has lived for some time with the Locktons, Curzon offers her a job as a spy for the American revolutionaries, asking her to secretly observe the Locktons, who are suspected Loyalists (Loyalists, or Tories, were the American colonists who were loyal to Britain, unlike the revolutionists. Wiser to the ways of the city and the rising revolutionary rebellion, Curzon becomes her friend and a key ally in surviving her new life in New York. A boy named Curzon, enslaved by a man named Officer Bellingham, takes her there. Isabel and Ruth are brought to the Locktons’ home as house slaves and serve alongside Becky Berry, their housekeeper, who is well-attuned to Madam Lockton’s fiery temper and whose main goal is to keep the peace.īefore even arriving at the Locktons’ house, however, Isabel is given her first job: to collect water at the Tea Water Pump. Caring neither for their well-being nor that Mary freed the sisters in her will, he sells them to the first eligible buyer he finds: Elihu and Anne Lockton, a wealthy couple, live in New York City, though they also own a plantation in Charleston, South Carolina. With Mary’s death, her greedy nephew Robert seizes control of all her assets, including Isabel and her sister, Ruth, who has an intellectual disability. The novel opens in a Rhode Island cemetery at the funeral of Mary Finch, Isabel’s owner. The novel is set in 1770s America before the Revolutionary War, and 13-year-old Isabel, the Black protagonist, is enslaved.
The novel explores the importance of family, the nature of freedom, and the courage needed for pursuing that freedom. The author anchors her narrative in history, beginning each chapter with an epigraph selected from historical documents, poetry, and letters from the era. With her new friend Curzon and courage summoned from her ancestors, she traverses the upheaval of war as the sisters’ future hangs in the balance. When Isabel reluctantly becomes a spy for the Continental Army, she faces danger at every turn. The protagonist, 13-year-old Isabel Finch, narrates her search for identity while caring for her sister and living at the estate of a despotic slave holder.
The historical fiction, set in 18th-century New York City, follows a young Black girl on her journey to escape slavery while the sparks of the colonists’ rebellion gradually ignite the American Revolution. Laurie Halse Anderson's middle-grade novel Chains (2008), a National Book Award finalist and Scott O’Dell Historical Fiction Award winner, is the first installment in her Seeds of America series.
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