Böcker av Sherrill Wark

"And our children." I said quietly. "They take any young Mi´gmaw children they catch fishing. They take them away." "As I well know!" Marguerite said. "They put them in prison, oui? That's where they are?" "No. It's not where they are and you know that, Marguerite. You know exactly where they are." "Mon Dieu. Don't tell me that. I don't want to know that. I don't want to think that. Not about my grandson! Let's go back to talking about rum. The damned rum that's ruining not only your people but our young ones as well. Oh mon Dieu, help me stop thinking about my grandson."

Nowhere to go. Nothing to eat.The only thing that survived, the only thing that could survive, was love-but only in the strongest."Village? There is no village. They are saying there's no longer a village anywhere. They burned everything down. Down flat. Trees, houses, churches, barns, the wheat fields." She swept her arm fully from left to right. "Everything is gone. They even..." She shook her head. "I don't know if I can say it. They burned everything. Everything. Even the cows and the chickens and the sheep." Those strange eyes once again bore into mine. "You could hear them crying out. I never knew a cow could scream." She turned away from me. "I never want to hear that again."

1694 Port Royal. Ordinary life is disrupted when a beautiful dark-skinned stranger floats in from the Big Bay in a dug-out. She is followed by three self-called slave hunters from Acadia's enemy, New England. The village drunk knows one of these "slave hunters" all too well: the man kidnapped his little sister years earlier, abandoning her at the docks of Boston Harbor. Keskoua, her love-smitten brother, the mysterious stranger, a friend with suspicious motives, and the drunk band together to plan a sea voyage on a cursed ship to find the drunk's sister and rescue the stranger's daughter from slavery."I enjoyed every single page."-Phyllis Bohonis, author of The WildernessI didn't ask it but she answered my question anyway: "These scars on the outside of me are not from being a slave. They are from being thought beautiful and living beside a jealous neighbor. The scars on the inside of me are from slavery. No one can see those.""I saw them," I told her. "I saw them when you were sitting there on the log with Hélène's shawl over your shoulders when you first got here. When Monsieur St-Amand was trying to look into your ears and your eyes with his glass instrument. The fear and anger became even stronger in you. It came out like a storm cloud."

Death without cause is strange enough on its own, but three deaths separated over 39 years and with no decomposition in any of the bodies sends Shaw Falls into a turmoil. A skeptical chief of police seeks the aid of a psychic while an uptight minister and an eccentric old lady neighbor team up to send a diabolical creature back to the hell it slithered in from.

"Some of [the Newcomers] had taken up the lonely life of trapping because they couldn't stand the lonely life of civilization. Some of them were running from women, from the fathers of women, from lawmen, or from each other. On the rough side, all of them were at least a little bit crazy whether they had started out that way or not."In this sometimes humorous, sometimes deadly serious account of life in 1678-81 Acadia when the Newcomers attempted to foist their ways onto The People, Keskoua, a Mi'gmaw girl, takes us into her world where murder and deceit mean nothing to those who come from away.Sherrill Wark, the author, a descendant of "the Frenchman Claude Guidry," brings us on a journey of enlightenment through the eyes of a resilient people determined to survive against almost unbearable challenges.