Rating: 3/5
**MINOR SPOILER**MINOR SPOILER**
I thought this book was very well-written. I would have given four stars, but nothing really… happened. About 50% of the supposed “diary entries” were just Catherine narrating about how the harvest was going that year. But there were some slightly interesting parts about the slave trade and Liberia and things, albeit that was just Catherine copying out newspaper articles.
The book was simply about how Catherine Hall lived in the 1830s as a farmer’s daughter; how her mother had died, and she now lived with her father and little sister; how she was stubborn and upset when her father remarried; and how, until he moved away to become a freeman in Canada, she helped a runaway slave from dying of cold.
A couple of things. One, that I thought the verse read out at her friend’s funeral (below) was slightly… I can’t think of the right word. Disturbing?
“She lived among us for a while
And brought joy where she went.
We thought she was a gift from God
But learnt she was but lent.”
Also, that I thought that the three lines written by the runaway slave Curtis to Catherine (below) were so pathetic and sad, and how only a few words like those can convey such meaning and emotion.
“PLEASE MISS
TAKE PITY
I AM COLD.”