by Joan Brady
First published 1993
Four-year-old Jonathan Carrick costs fifteen dollars at a Kansas market. The white boy becomes property of a tobacco farmer who stakes him to the floor of a sod hut to prevent escape. Jonathan plants and harvests tobacco while other children attend school. He endures beatings from George Stoke, the farmer's soft son who torments him daily. The boy nurses his rage and waits. When the railroad arrives in Sweetbrier, Jonathan flees to Denver. He works as a brakeman on the TransContinental Mogul, rides freight cars through the Rockies, and befriends College, another runaway. A preacher in Cheyenne tries to save his soul. Jonathan eventually gets an education in Maine and marries uneasily. But George Stoke haunts him still. Now a senator known as a fearless liberal, Stoke remains the target of Jonathan's burning hatred. The strategies of war consume Jonathan's thoughts as he plots his revenge against the man who destroyed his childhood.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, 19th-century
Vibes: dark, emotional, suspenseful
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, revenge
Setting: Kansas, Denver, Cheyenne, Maine
Period: 19th-Century
257 pages · Hardcover · Knopf
Content warnings: child-abuse, slavery, violence