Or Give Me Death

Name: Or Give Me Death
Rating: 4.3 (64 reviews)

by Ann Rinaldi

First published 2003

Amazon

4.1(64)

Patrick Henry’s public career moves toward the speech remembered for “Give me liberty, or give me death,” while his daughters live with a private crisis. Their mother Sarah’s severe mental illness is concealed within the household, creating fear, shame and responsibilities the children cannot openly discuss.

By setting revolutionary rhetoric beside domestic confinement, the novel questions whose suffering disappears when history celebrates a single heroic voice. The daughters’ perspectives reveal affection and resentment within the Henry family and expose the distance between political liberty and the restricted lives of women, children and enslaved people.