The Ransom of Mercy Carter by Caroline B. Cooney

She didn’t back away from the very harsh historical facts.

Cooney meticulously researched the fate of the captives and where each one of them ended up. One of the difficulties about writing about historic events is that much of the plot is out of the author’s hands. During the wait, she learns more about her Indian captors and begins an immersion into their culture that will leave her permanently changed. She makes it to Montreal and waits for ransom to arrive that can reunite her with her British family. Of those, many were killed along the way because they could not keep up with the rigors of the march.Įleven-year-old Mercy Carter is one of the survivors. They took more than 100 captives and began marching them 300 miles north to Canada. It was a harsh, snowy February when Indians with French rifles attacked the settlement of Deerfield. The Ransom of Mercy Carter is a novelization of a historical event in Massachusetts in 1704. As much as I might hesitate to recommend to a sensitive young child a book that describes scalpings in detail and the sound of a tomahawk hitting a skull, I also appreciate that Caroline Cooney didn’t back away from the difficult nature of the story. Books such as The Ransom of Mercy Carter is one of those novels that would have to be sanitized in order to escape an R rating if it were made into a movie.Īnd to sanitize such a book would be to take away the point of it. It surprises me sometimes how very violent and graphic young adult stories can be. Caroline lives in Westbrook, Connecticut and when she's not writing she volunteers at a hospital, plays piano for the school musicals and daydreams!

She often organizes what she calls a 'plotting game,' in which students work together to create plots for stories. To keep her stories realistic, Caroline visits many schools outside of her area, learning more about teenagers all the time. 'In a suspense novel, you can count on action.' Suspense novels are her favorites to read and write. She began to sell stories to Seventeen magazine and soon after began writing books. When her children were young, Caroline started writing books for young people - with remarkable results. I started writing then and never stopped!'

'He used to rip off covers from The New Yorker and pass them around and make us write a short story on whichever cover we got. Caroline Cooney knew in sixth grade that she wanted to be a writer when 'the best teacher I ever had in my life' made writing her main focus.

The Ransom of Mercy Carter by Caroline B. Cooney