Review by New York Times Review
Quakers are often lauded as essential actors in the pre-Civil War drama of the Underground Railroad, but not every Friend eagerly harbored escaping slaves. Such is the dismaying discovery of Honor Bright, a principled English Quaker recently arrived in Ohio, after her new American family admonishes her not to aid the covert network. Honor ignores the warnings and becomes' enmeshed in the conflicting agendas of a scurrilous slave hunter with disconcerting sex appeal and his salty Railroad-running sister. Chevalier, the author of "Girl With a Pearl Earring," succumbs to the potboiler temptations of historical fiction as familiar supporting characters muscle their way toward a baldly formulaic denouement. Yet her unfussy narrative voice is well suited to her protagonist's Quaker milieu. Her book is as much about the primacy of quilting in the early American social order as it is about the perils of abetting slaves. An American living in London, she also has a personal line into Honor's wonder at her new surroundings. "The potatoes are larger, with more eyes," Honor writes home, a simple observation that sweetly encapsulates the weirdness of displacement.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 14, 2013]