Title: Flight of the Sparrow Author: Amy Belding Brown
Published: July 1, 2014
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 368
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1676.
Even before Mary Rowlandson is captured by Indians on a winter day of violence and terror, she sometimes found herself in conflict with her rigid Puritan community. Now, her home destroyed, her children lost to her, she has been sold into the service of a powerful woman tribal leader, made a pawn in the on-going bloody struggle between English settlers and native people. Battling cold, hunger, and exhaustion, Mary witnesses harrowing brutality but also unexpected kindness. To her confused surprise, she is drawn to her captors’ open and straightforward way of life, a feeling further complicated by her attraction to a generous, protective English-speaking native known as James Printer. All her life, Mary has been taught to fear God, submit to her husband, and abhor Indians. Now, having lived on the other side of the forest, she begins to question the edicts that have guided her, torn between the life she knew and the wisdom the natives have shown her.
I picked up Flight of the Sparrow because it sounded very similar to my #1 favorite middle grade historical novel—I really hoped Amy Belding Brown might have written the adult equivalent here, for my adult self to enjoy just as my pre-teen self enjoyed that other book. Sadly, I didn’t love this the way I’d hoped. Flight of the Sparrow is an interesting look at colonial America and the tensions between Puritans and Indians that existed, but I wasn’t completely blown away.
The novel’s protagonist, Mary Rowlandson, is a middle-aged Puritan wife and mother whose home is raided by Indians. She and her three children are taken captive by a Nipmuc tribe, then separated as they are sold to separate families. For several months, Mary works as a slave for a powerful woman chieftan, and a lot of her firmly held beliefs about a woman’s proper sphere, child-rearing, and violence are shaken. Eventually, Mary’s husband ransoms her, and she finds that her adjustment back to her old English life is more difficult than she would have thought.
I do like a lot of the story Brown tells here in Flight of the Sparrow, and that’s why I was so drawn to it originally. And I do like that Mary Rowlandson was a real historical figure, whose memoir of her time as a captive became one of the first-ever American bestsellers. That’s all very interesting information, and I can’t say that I don’t like it, but in the end I wasn’t sure that everything had come together as well as it might have, and that was the big drawback with this book for me.
For example, Brown’s characters, including Mary, typify the racism and ultra-strict theology that would have been common among 17th century Puritans, and while that sometimes made this book frustrating to read, it also gave our protagonist room to grow. And for a while, we do see Mary move past her racism as she begins to see that not all Indians are evil, and that not only white people display “Christian” virtue and behavior. Yet, at the end, she walks away from her Indian friends, her past, and settles down to marry a Puritan widower because it’s what’s expected of her. It felt almost like a disconnect, to me. Mary goes through all this, only to end up in exactly the same situation she was in at the beginning of the book, only now she’s married to a less pretentious, self-righteous man. I almost felt cheated of her character growth, there.
There were other things, too, but everything all kind of circles around to the same point: the book has a lot of potential, but the ending falls flat and leaves things unresolved or unclear. More than anything else, that is Flight of the Sparrow’s major failing.
I did like this book, and I’m glad I gave it a try, but at the same time, I don’t necessarily find it anything truly wonderful or worth making a fuss about. I’d recommend Flight of the Sparrow to readers who are interested more in colonial life in the United States (before it was the US), and about Puritan race relations with Native Americans. But this was certainly a good book, just not a great one.
