I love Laurie Halse Anderson. I really, really, really do. After devouring five of her books almost one after the other, I took a break from her books, intending to return to her writing, but not wanting to read all of her books at once, leaving none to enjoy later.From the first few pages, I was hooked into the story. The narrator, Isabel, has such an amazingly strong character. The story is intense, but with some down time in between climaxes, which is good because when the story is intense, the reader almost has a knot in her stomach, waiting to see if Isabel can make it out of the situation alive. It's horrifying what Isabel has to endure as a slave to a white family, in 1770s America, back when it was still a British colony. The storyline takes place during the time of political unrest leading up to the War of Independence (I think that's what it was called). I thought that we had learned a lot about American history at school, but this book showed me that there's still a lot about this time period that I don't particularly understand. It is for that reason that the story merited only four stars. If I knew more about the time period, which I'm sure most American teenagers do, then the book would have been easier to read. Since I wasn't as familiar with the time period, it drew my attention away from the central focus of the plot, because I had to look some things up, or reread some parts, just to fully understand the full plot.
