Forge

Name: Forge
Rating: 4.2 (19286 reviews)

by Laurie Halse Anderson Book 2 in the Seeds of America series.

First published 2010

Amazon

4.2(19,286)

New York and Pennsylvania, 1777–1778. Curzon is separated from Isabel and working as a wagon driver when he is caught in the fighting at Saratoga. He enlists in the Continental Army while concealing that he is an escaped enslaved person. The march to Valley Forge gives him comrades and a claim to belonging, but hunger, disease, inadequate clothing and racial prejudice make the winter encampment another test of survival.

The army’s transformation under George Washington and Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben unfolds beside Curzon’s unstable legal status. John Laurens’s antislavery arguments and the presence of Lafayette illuminate competing meanings of the Patriot cause, yet Curzon can still be seized and treated as property. His reunion with Isabel forces both of them to decide whether loyalty to the Revolution can coexist with their more immediate fight against re-enslavement.