Monday, July 27, 2015

The Mapmaker's Children: Sarah McCoy


  • Hardcover: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Crown (May 5, 2015)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0385348908
  • ISBN-13: 978-0385348904





When Sarah Brown, daughter of abolitionist John Brown, realizes that her artistic talents may be able to help save the lives of slaves fleeing north, she becomes one of the Underground Railroad’s leading mapmakers, taking her cues from the slave code quilts and hiding her maps within her paintings. She boldly embraces this calling after being told the shocking news that she can’t bear children, but as the country steers toward bloody civil war, Sarah faces difficult sacrifices that could put all she loves in peril.
   Eden, a modern woman desperate to conceive a child with her husband, moves to an old house in the suburbs and discovers a porcelain head hidden in the root cellar—the remains of an Underground Railroad doll with an extraordinary past of secret messages, danger and deliverance. 
   Ingeniously plotted to a riveting end, Sarah and Eden’s woven lives connect the past to the present, forcing each of them to define courage, family, love, and legacy in a new way.

My take on this book:
I chose this book to read because I have always been interested in Civil War and WV history. This story enter twines the past and the present, and does it effortlessly. Eden Anderson has recently moved into a historical civil war era house in New Charleston WV, where she finds a porcelain doll head in the root cellar, a finding that will have he delving into the history of the underground railroad.

The author easily transitions from past to present within the pages of this story, and honestly the historical aspects were my favorite. While I could easily empathize with Eden and the issues she was dealing with, issues that allowed a connection with Sarah Brown, the daughter of the famous abolitionist John Brown, it was the historical aspects of  the Underground Railroad that held my attention, allowing me to feel like I was getting a bit of a history lesson. Anyone who enjoys historical fiction especially revolving around the civil war will find this an interesting read.

A complimentary copy of this book was provided for review.


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