Photo courtesy HarperCollins.com
At the end of spring break, I put my beach-y romance novels back on the shelf and reached for an entirely different read.
“Free Men,” a thought-provoking novel set in 1788, tracks the interconnected journey of a runaway slave named Bob, a grieving white man called Cat and a Native American dreamer named Istillicha. This unlikely trio commits an unplanned murder, and the story follows a French tracker named Le Clerc as he pursues them.
If you are looking for historical fiction that you cannot put down, Jackson-native author Katy Simpson Smith delivers with her sophomore novel, crafting beautifully developed characters who tell a story all their own.
Smith, whose first novel, “The Story of Land and Sea,” was critically acclaimed, creates characters with heartbreaking, all too realistic backstories that punctuate the actual plot of the novel. Readers get a painful look at the lifestyle of a typical African-American slave in the 1780s, and Smith uses Bob’s restlessness as a slave to explore the idea of freedom. Bob muses, “Get yourself a new life, a free one, make things that no one else can claim.” His character delves into the choices enslaved people made, looking at what they had to lose in running away while holding onto a hope that they had something to gain.
Perhaps the greatest deviant from stereotype, Cat, an orphaned white male, suffers a painful childhood scarred with memories from working for a surgeon during wartime, as well as the death of his alcoholic father. His life drastically changes when he meets the love of his life, but Cat suffers tragedy yet again. Cat’s story was the one that brought me to tears, simply because he truly experienced and almost personifies grief. His character presents readers with the question: What good is a white man’s privilege if he has nothing for which to live?
Istillicha’s character helps to connect the dots between the main characters’ backstories, the crime committed and Le Clerc’s manhunt. However, his character is equally developed. Elements of betrayal touch several parts of his life, and Istillicha’s will to succeed is just one inspiring factor in the novel. At the end of the story, I felt most triumphant for him.
I praise Smith for her charismatic characters, believable storytelling and strong dialogue that sometimes made me take out a pen and underline. She takes big themes like racial discrimination, freedom, morality and love and puts them into a relatable story about life.
I would recommend “Free Men” to anyone looking for historical fiction that tells a believable story with characters who are connected in ways that words cannot really articulate. This story definitely explores that kind of bond, and it truly transports readers back in time to experience unbelievable hardships and hard-fought victories.
