We listened to Chains on audio and it took a good bit longer to finish than I expected. For some reason I had it in my head that it was a short book, it wasn’t. It was pretty darn good, though. At first, I was skeptical. I like Laurie Halse Anderson’s contemporary YA fiction and I wasn’t sure she could pull off something about slaves just prior to and in the early days of the Revolutionary War but she did it. And she did it well.
I’ve got a little love/hate with the ending. I guess it did end as it should have (and goodness knows, she’d have needed another 400 pages to get us to another ending…) but I would really have liked to find out what happens next. Hah… good thing there’s a sequel… though reading the synopsis on Amazon leads me to wonder if I’m going to be happy with what happens next. I’m reserving it on audio now.
And with this book, I’ve finished the Middle Grade Fiction books from the Cybils Shortlist – they were all excellent choices, every darn one of them.
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Oh, I thought it was a shortish book too.
I’ve read Fever, 1793 which is another of her historicals. It wasn’t bad but not as good as her contemporary novels I’ve read.
FYI, apparently there’s also maybe going to be a third book in the Chains series.