A Stolen Life - Hardcover

Grade 5-8-Jamesina Mackenzie, 13, has been left in the care of relatives in the Scottish highlands while her father and youngest brother are in exile in France and her three other brothers fight with the British army in America. Fearing that she may be in danger because of the political situation and her father's loyalties, her grandfather allows her to pose as a boy. One day, Jamie and a friend are overtaken by spiriters-kidnappers who sell the young people they capture as bond slaves in America. Her companion is left for dead, and she is captured and spends the next several months in misery during the harrowing passage. Her captors are disappointed when they learn that she is a girl, one without skills, as she has come from a well-off family. She is finally sold, and the remainder of the book chronicles the unhappy and difficult time she spends working on a plantation in the Virginia Colony. In a satisfying, if somewhat far-fetched, ending, she is reunited with her brothers and the friend she thought dead. The story moves briskly and is packed with details about Jamesina's life. Initially, readers may be overwhelmed by the Scottish names, places, and history, but Curry does a good job of relating the frustration and unfairness of the situation that powerless Jamesina finds herself in. This is a solid piece of exciting prerevolutionary historical fiction with a courageous heroine.
Carrie Schadle, Beginning with Children School, New York City
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Curry (Turtle Island, p. 798, etc.) plunges readers into the perilous world of 1758 Scotland, where ``spiriters''men who, with the knowledge and approval of Aberdeen's magistrates and merchants, snatched children and sold them into bondage in Americathrived. Young Jamesina Mackenzie is spirited away during a picnic. Aboard the America-bound Sparrowhawk, she is kept in a cage until her captors reach Richmond, Virginia, where she is inspected and sold to the Shaws Plantation. She chafes at servitudeshe is maid, messenger, laundress, and horse groombut realizes her life is easier than that of the African slaves. Jamesina's mistress and master send her off with former bondsman Biggs, as part of his freedom dues. When Cherokees kill Biggs for horse theft, Jamesina is taken to the Cherokee village of Itsanti, until the British army headed by Scottish Highlanders arrives to claim Cherokee land, and Jamesina is happily reunited with members of her own family. Curry successfully combines little-known facts about US history with a page-turning tale of hardships overcome. The jacket painting instantly evokes Jamesina's world; in text and in art, she's an appealing heroine, full of old-fashioned spunk. (Fiction. 10-14) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.