Deborah Larsen

In 1758, when Mary Jemison is about sixteen, a Shawnee raiding party captures her Irish family near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Mary is the only one not killed and scalped. She is instead given to two Seneca sisters to replace their brother who was killed by whites. Emerging slowly from shock, Mary--now named Two-Falling-Voices--begins to make her home in Seneca culture and the wild landscape. She goes on to marry a Delaware, then a Seneca, and, though she contemplates it several times, never show more rejoins white society. Larsen alludes beautifully to the way Mary apprehends the brutality of both the white colonists and the native tribes; and how, open-eyed and independent, she thrives as a genuine American. show less

I read of Mary Jemeson first as a child in Lois Lenski's book, Indian Captive, a book I read many times. So I was interested in reading a different telling. And Deborah Larsen's telling was very different.

Larsen's tale has much more to do with Mary's inner journey than her outer one. We see Mary change and come to grips with her life --and the words are beautiful, almost poetic - but in the end we still don't have the answer to that nagging question -- why?

Mary seems to be simply captured show more by inertia. She is, and that in the end leaves us wanting - its like taking a bite of a rich pastry, getting a taste, but when you look for more - there's only air. show less

I expected more from this somehow. What I read was detached and dreamlike in the fact that it didn’t mesh to reality very well. It seemed that Mary didn’t really believe what was happening to her and recounted events dispassionately. Like she was describing what happened to another person.

All through the book we had paragraphs of inner monologue that seemed to be in an entirely different voice then the other paragraphs. At first I thought these were taken from the actual manuscript of show more Mary’s story, but they weren’t. They were just thoughts. show less

This is the story of a young woman and her growth
in a convent. She describes her short life as a
Catholic nun. The everyday facts of that life are
a keen interest of mine. It is one of the few that
I have read that told of the day to day life.

The other fact of the story that I liked was the
absence of the horror stories and the diatribes
against the Catholic church. It is refreshing to
see a former nun who accepts responsibility for
her decisions, both to going and coming from that life.