"When I swung over that windowsill, everything changed for me. We are meant to go in and out of doors in civilized style, but my mother bade me climb into woodsy wildness and a darkness flushed with crimson light and torches …" Clambering into the branches of a tree, a young woman flees flaming arrows and massacre. She will need to struggle for survival: to scour the wilderness for shelter, to strive and seek for a new family and a setting where she can belong. Her unmarked way is costly and hard. For Charis, the world outside the window of home is a maze of hazards. And even if she survives the wilds, it is no simple matter to discover and nest among her own kind—the godly, those called Puritans by others. She may be tugged by her desires for companionship, may even stumble into an intense love for a man, and may be made to try the strength of female heroism in ways no longer familiar to women in our century. Streams of darkness run through the seventeenth-century villages of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Occult fears have a way of creeping into the mind. What young woman can be safe from the dangers of wilderness when its shadowy thickets spring up so easily in the soil of human hearts? Much will oppose Charis' longings for renewal and peace; she must pursue and discover the hero's path to a larger, more vivid life.
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Book club met last night, so now I don't have to finish this! Turns out, getting through 60% was more than enough, because we only talked about one plot point that I hadn't gotten to yet. But I bet you can imagine what it was based on the fact that this is a Historical Fiction About Puritans.
I alternated being interested and finding the loooong passages of descriptions boring enough that I started nodding off a few times.
But really, the reason I'm reviewing is because this is not a very widely reviewed book and as such there were not any reviews on GR that indicated that this has MASSIVE TRIGGERS all over it. I actually stopped reading before Charis had her baby, but the aforementioned ending indicates to me that Charis did not lose the pregnancy nor die from it.
As such, for future readers, here you go - warnings through the parts I read.
TW/CW: Murder/massacre, on-page death of family members, discussions of dying in childbirth, pregnancy, what we would now call post-partum depression, suicide, death of an infant, elements of racism against indigenous people
