Freedom Dues - Indra Zuno

AUTHOR: Indra Zuno

NARRATOR: Sarah-Jane Drummey

GENRE: Historical Fiction

RATING: 3.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: Outstanding in its historical details, but why couldn’t the story have included some happy moments too? This was mentally exhausting.

Story:

1729, Ireland. Blaire Eakins is a fifteen year old Scot living during the period of a nationwide famine. (Not the Great Irish Famine, as I had originally assumed, which came more than a century later.) When there is no hope of a better future for him in his town, he decides to accompany his brother to set sail to Philadelphia. As they have no money for passage, they commit to being indentured servants for a period of four years, at the end of which period they would earn their “freedom dues” – payment made in the form of money and some non-cash items to enable the ex-servant to begin a free life. But will things go as easily as planned?

1729, London. Mallie Ambrose, a ten year old orphan, is arrested on charges of pickpocketing. Her sentence is “transportation”, being compelled into indentured servitude and exiled to the American colonies. With no say in the matter, Mallie resigns herself to making the best of her new life in the American continent. Obviously, she too has no idea of what lies ahead for her.

The story is written in a third person narration from the perspective of Blair’s and Mallie’s characters.

The book is divided in four parts, and the two main characters meet only in the final part. Each part covers one phase of their lives.

If you are a fan of history, you will find much to savour in this book. The author’s research is impeccable. She seems to have listed out the details of how life was for the poor in the 1730s in Ireland, London and America and incorporated them extensively in her story. Unfortunately, this is also the undoing of the book. What should have been an enlightening experience borders almost on misery porn. One after another, life keeps throwing curveballs at Blair and Mallie. After a while, you are mentally prepared for the fact that nothing good will ever happen in the book; every scene had to have some negative incident. You name an issue and it is there in the story: rape, corporal punishment, extreme poverty, gender discrimination, biased judiciary, sexual abuse, medical issues, natural disasters such as famines and storms, racist thinking, slavery and slave trade, fires,… There’s a lot more but I got tired of making note of all the catastrophes. I have read Solomon Northup's "Twelve Years a Slave", which is the nonfiction account of an actual Black slave, and even that book wasn't so depressing!

(A part of me feels that this happened because it is a debut work. The author has done her research well and she wanted to make sure she used every bit of her work. It reminded me a bit of my MBA project days, when I worked diligently to gather information and I would try my best to include everything in my homework just to show the professor how meticulously I had worked.😉)

Blair and Mallie are strong characters, though somehow, I never really felt very close to them even after reading the entire book. The writing style somehow keeps them distant. Nevertheless, they do make an impact. Blair especially is interesting in the way he discriminates against Black slaves and Catholics and the Irish (not necessarily in that order) though he himself is an indentured slave. It shows the duality of thinking of the people of those times. (Actually, this duality exists even nowadays; only the categories of discrimination have changed.) The rest of the characters don’t pop up long enough to make a mark on the mind. The story belongs to Blair and Mallie, and it stays that way right till the end.

Minor personal complaint: There was no need to detail out the sex scene so extensively. It was not a requirement of the story, and such superfluous writing just lowers my opinion of it.

The audiobook clocks at about 12 hours and is narrated brilliantly by Sarah-Jane Drummey. She keeps her accents and her enunciation clear. At the same time, this is not an easy book to listen to, not just because of the torturous pain that life keeps inflicting on Blair and Mallie. There are too many characters in Blair’s and Mallie’s lives, and keeping track of who’s who become very difficult after a point. Furthermore, some characters make a reappearance long after their first exit, by which time you have completely forgotten who they were.

I am not quite sure how to rate this book. I admired so much of the author’s dedication to historical detail. However, I would never like to read this again because it was so depressing. If I had to torture myself so much, I would have picked up a historical nonfiction on a difficult topic, whereby I would have been better prepared for the emotional onslaught. I guess I’ll just go a little more than the midway mark and stick to 3.5 stars, not because I liked it but because I learned a lot from it.

My thanks to Spinning a Yarn Press and NetGalley for the ALC of “Freedom Dues”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook.