Sarah Bishop, by Scott O'Dell
This story for school-aged kids is about a young girl living during the American Revolution. Her mother is dead, so she is the woman of the household, her brother is a Patriot, and her father is a Tory.
As the story progresses, it leaves the reader with the feeling of, "Gee this girl can't get a break." I imagined the female, teenage version of the book of Job. She loses her father and home to some lawless Patriots, discovers her brother has died on board a British prison ship, and is being hunted by the British for something she did not do.
Her subsequent journey is a depiction of what life would have been like back then for a single woman in war time with no guardian but herself. She did what, in my opinion, was a smart thing to do: go off in the woods and live alone until the whole thing is over. But even that created some problems for her, which I am glad she managed to work out. At 3/4 of the way through the book, I was positive she was going to die in the end, but thankfully, the author did something unexpected.
It is good when authors do things the readers do not expect. Too much predictable stuff makes a boring story. The other thing that was interesting is that Sarah is narrating the story (meaning it is written in first person) but it is told in a very detached way, as if Sarah has an emotional disorder that keeps her completely level at all times except the most extreme moments. However as the story goes on, I began to think that this way of narrating was an indication of constant, extreme emotional distress lurking below the surface and that if Sarah were to allow that emotion just a little freedom, then it would all come crashing out and she would lose all ability to function in the crazy world in which she was trying to survive.
This gives the story some excitement and the feeling that she is a ticking time bomb and that at any moment the story may end because she has gone off. But in giving her that detached method of relaying events, the author also made her somewhat accessible, in a sense, to a wider range of people who may understand what she is going through.
I think this is a good book for kids, anyone interested in historical fiction, anyone who enjoys reading like a middle schooler again, and anyone who ever thought "My Side of the Mountain" was a cool book. Incidentally, that may have to be another book I review here.
