Jeanette Baxter Libri

Leading scholars explore the work of Andrea Levy, with chapters covering each of her novels including Small Island and a new interview with the author.

In this final instalment of Jean Rae Baxter's best-selling trilogy, eighteen-year-old Charlotte arrives in Charleston in the beleaguered Thirteen Colonies to join her new husband Nick. She little expects that she will be searching for him in an alligator-infested South Carolina swamp. During these final months of the American Revolution, she must muster all her wit and courage not just to rescue Nick but also to save the young soldier Elijah from despair and to bring freedom to the pair of teenage runaway slaves she has befriended. Charlotte and her friends meet some of life's most dangerous challenges as they encounter the perils of nature and of war. Freedom Bound delivers a frank and realistic picture of the slave system and a powerful account of what was at stake for both white and black Loyalists as they prepared to set forth to find a new home in the country that was soon to be Canada. Like The Way Lies North and Broken Trail, the two novels that preceded it, Freedom Bound contains a wealth of carefully researched historical details of one of the least known chapters of our history.

This young adult historical novel focuses on Charlotte and her family, Loyalists who are forced to flee their home in the Mohawk Valley as a result of the violence of the 'Sons of Liberty' during the American Revolution. At the beginning, fifteen-year-old Charlotte Hooper and her parents begin the long trek north to the safety of Fort Haldimand (near present-day Kingston). The novel portrays Charlotte's struggle on the difficult journey north, and the even more difficult task of making a new home in British Canada. In the flight north, the Mohawk nation plays an important role, and Charlotte learns much about their customs and way of life, to the point where she is renamed 'Woman of Two Worlds.' Later in the novel she is able to repay her aboriginal friends when she plays an important part in helping the Oneidas to become once again members of the Iroquois confederacy under British protection. Strong and capable, Charlotte breaks the stereotype of the eighteenth-century woman, while revealing a positive relationship between the Loyalists and aboriginal peoples.