Ghost Fox

This is a captivating story that will appeal to those who love well-written historical fiction. The author has a decided flair for epic storytelling, as the reader will be riveted to this wonderfully told tale of abduction, slavery, and love. It is the story of Sarah Wells, a seventeen year old settler from the colony of New Hampshire, who is forcibly captured by a party of Abnaki Indians, sympathetic to the French, during the time of the French and Indian Wars. Taken to their village where she is made to live the life of a slave, Sarah develops a loving relationship with the Taliwan, the gentle son of the old Abnaki Indian woman to whom she had been given in slavery. It is her relationship with Taliwan that would eventually become a pivotal one in her life. The book is rich in the details of her life with the Abnaki, ground in the context of the times and the French and Indian Wars. It is the story of two worlds and the ways that Sarah Wells finds to straddle both. She ultimately must choose, however, one over the other. It is a choice that will eventually be a test her love. This is an action packed story that will keep the reader turning the pages of the book until the very last. I loved this book when I first read it about twenty five years ago. In reading it again, time has not diminished this wonderfully told story.

This is a captivating story that will appeal to those who love well-written historical fiction. The author has a decided flair for epic storytelling, as the reader will be riveted to this wonderfully told tale of abduction, slavery, and love. It is the story of Sarah Wells, a seventeen year old settler from the colony of New Hampshire, who is forcibly captured by a party of Abnaki Indians, sympathetic to the French, during the time of the French and Indian Wars. Taken to their village where she is made to live the life of a slave, Sarah develops a loving relationship with Taliwan, the gentle son of the old Abnaki Indian woman to whom she had been given in slavery. It is her relationship with Taliwan that would eventually become a pivotal one in her life. The book is rich in the details of her life with the Abnaki, ground in the context of the times and the French and Indian Wars. It is the story of two worlds and the ways that Sarah Wells finds to straddle both. She ultimately must choose, however, one over the other. It is a choice that will eventually be a test her love. This is an action packed story that will keep the reader turning the pages of the book until the very last. I loved this book when I first read it about twenty five years ago. In reading it again, time has not diminished this wonderfully told story.

"Ghost Fox" is a well-written, thought-provoking story of Native American and colonial settler's lives. More vivid than most books of its type, it does a wonderful job of drawing comparisons between the cold, stark, unforgiving New York wilderness winters giving way to seductive springs and the harsh, hard-working and judgemental colonial American existence giving way to the nomadic, sometimes fierce but often gentle Indian life. I felt despair, joy, emptiness, love and the bite of a New England wind as I sat reading "Ghost Fox" in my Florida home.

Ghost Fox is the story of a young girl taken far from home by raiding Abnaki warriors. Living in a culture entirely alien from her own, she dreams of escape. She is taken into the tribe as a slave. After escaping and being returned to the tribe, she discovers she likes her new way of life, and that it is possible to hold a place in the tribe other than slave. She falls in love, has a child, and is taken again by English soldiers who slaughter the tribe. How she returns to her biological family, and subsequently her surviving Indian family, makes a great story.