Although this book contained just under 700 pages, cramming 65 years of life into one volume seems ambitious. However, no one does it better, and in surprising detail, than Nancy E. Turner.
My Name is Resolute covers the life of Resolute Talbot, the youngest of three siblings born in Jamaica to parents running a plantation for the British king. Beginning with a pirate siege leading to a voyage to the American colonies, the story details Resolute’s transition from a daughter of nobility to a poor colonist dependent on her weaving skills for survival in the years immediately preceding the Revolutionary War.
The reader accompanies Resolute as a spoiled and scared 10-year-old child, snatched from her homeland and torn from the protection of her older sister and brother and forced into slavery in the Massachusetts area. From there, we vividly experience an Indian capture and learn to weave with her. Turner knows exactly which events to elaborate on for entire chapters to keep pace, and which cause the most profound shock when bluntly stated in no more than a sentence in the middle of a page.
For example, like The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones, the reader will never know when she’s about to be blindsided by a major death…or several.
As the author of the three “diaries” of Sarah Agnes Prine, whose story takes place a few generations later in the late 1800s to 1900s on the undeveloped American frontier, I especially enjoyed the Easter egg she placed in Resolute’s story–a Prine ancestor who came over to the colonies during the war.
Through more than 50 years of indescribable courage, Resolute manages to blossom from a terrified and ignorant child longing to go home, to a gritty and brave patriot who realizes she has created her own.
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