"Bound" - Sally Gunning

Summary:

Servant in 1700’s runs away from abusive master, is arrested for murder.

Thoughts:

Okay so this was a definite chick book.

Immense hardship threatening to crush her, but she presses on, with a new and even more horrible plot twist waiting at every turn.  And, of course, she stays silent during all this abuse and hardship, feeling desperate and alone.  I don’t mean to belittle slavery and abuse, but the girl is written in such a way that she really starts to piss me off.  If you’re being abused by someone, you leave, you tell someone, you fight back (frying pan to the head when he’s not looking would do nicely).  You don’t just quietly take it, hoping he’ll stop.  This kind of behaviour causes readers to think that degradation and rape are okay, that although they’re unpleasant they’re also commonplace.  This is wrong!

The writing itself is okay, despite the profuse inner dialogue, (worrying, working things out in her head) but she does have a bit of an excuse in that the protagonist is young and has few people to turn to for guidance.  My biggest beef with this book was the hammering home of tired points.  For example,

[Discussing Alice’s indenture papers with Mr. Freeman]

“Musn’t the widow sign it, sir?”

…“[The papers] passed to me at our marriage, in accordance with the law.”

Alice didn’t understand.  She didn’t understand at all.  And then, of course, she understood it very well.

The widow and Freeman were married.

So she didn’t understand… and then she didn’t understand… and then she did.  UGH!  Okay so I get it that she’s trying to create suspense or build-up, but it just sounds so dumb.  There are other ways to convey this without making the passage plodding.

The murder trial and subsequent fall-out was interesting and unsettling.  In other words, it was well done.  The protagonist’s chaste little love story on the side was quite good, I enjoyed those parts.  To think that someone could be brutalized and treated as though she was invisible, and then be able find someone who was nice to her.  It was a hopeful little side plot.  There was also a bunch of political stuff in there about taxes and importation.  Kind of boring.  Sorry I'm not one for history, politics, or the history of politics.

I think the book was, overall, worth reading.  It’s not going on my favourites list, but I’m also not sorry that I read it.