Book Review: ‘Rebellion 1776,’ by Laurie Halse Anderson

REBELLION 1776, by Laurie Halse Anderson

Writers of historical fiction for children face a unique challenge: taking customs and language of a time very different from the present and making them real, and meaningful, to readers who are submerged in contemporary lingo and have scant knowledge of history. Laurie Halse Anderson, the 2023 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award winner and author of the Seeds of America trilogy (“Chains,” “Forge” and “Ashes”), is a master of the genre, by virtue of exhaustive research and lively, fast-paced writing.

With “Rebellion 1776,” Anderson returns once again to the Revolutionary War era. Set in Boston, the story begins toward the end of Gen. George Washington’s brilliant siege, which enfolds the city into the Patriot cause.

While events like the Boston Massacre, the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Battles of Lexington and Concord are part of our national mythology, what happened after the British fled Boston is not nearly as well known. Those times were also filled with struggle, courage and pain. Aside from the wreckage of the British occupation — which was severe — the newly independent Patriots soon had to deal with another invasion: a smallpox epidemic.

As Anderson tells us in her source notes at the end, her latest tale was inspired by the long letters Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John (then serving in the Continental Congress), during her trip — with her four children, her sisters and their families, a few cousins and her father’s enslaved maid — from their farm in Braintree, Mass., to Boston to be inoculated against the surging disease.

The novel may be historical, but its themes echo our current tensions: vaccine detractors versus promoters, royalists versus patriots, misogyny versus feminism, old ways of living and loving versus new ways of being true to oneself.

There is a fair bit of skulduggery as well — stolen fortunes, false accusations, thefts, betrayals — that adds mystery and suspense.

At the start, our 13-year-old narrator, Elsbeth Malona Culpepper, has already lost her mother and three younger siblings to smallpox in Philadelphia and migrated with her father to Boston, where he stays in a boardinghouse and works as a sailmaker at a loft on the Long Wharf and she’s employed as a live-in kitchen maid to a Loyalist judge.

On the day of the British evacuation Elsbeth’s father goes missing. Has he fled, been forcibly taken away or worse? Elsbeth doesn’t know, and spends a good part of the book trying to find out.

Left on her own and having little choice in the matter, she’s retained as a servant to the wealthy family that takes over the judge’s house when he evacuates: a former Patriot spy, his wife, their six challenging children and Hannah Sparhawk, the teenage charge they’re temporarily sheltering (in whom Elsbeth finds a “kindred spirit”).

Elsbeth labors mightily day and night, while dealing with the cruelty and jealousy of the chief housekeeper, known as Widow Nash.

The situation becomes more complex when the family gets inoculated and contracts the immunity-building “milder” version of smallpox these early vaccines induced. There are evocative descriptions of the frightful (and frightening) disease, its painful evolution and the — not always successful — effort to contain it. Under the mistaken impression that she had smallpox as a baby, Hannah skips the vaccine, with heart-rending consequences. Elsbeth, indeed immune, having come down with the illness when her mother and siblings had it, bears the brunt of the caretaking. And much of the sorrow.

The soul of the novel is Elsbeth’s own private rebellion: the fight for her personal freedom.

And yes, there is also a love story, but not in the passionate, physical mode of contemporary romance. Rather, Elsbeth’s affection for Shubel Kent, an orphaned boy who worked for a shoemaker before the evacuation and eventually becomes a soldier in the Continental Army, is a tale of growing friendship and trust that will lead to a youthful marriage, even as he goes back to the ongoing war for independence.

Filled with immersive detail, expert delineations of complex characters, and both harsh and loving reality, “Rebellion 1776” provides young readers with a true experience of a historic moment in time that resonates with today’s world. To use Elsbeth’s celebratory last word, “Huzzah!”

REBELLION 1776 | By Laurie Halse Anderson | (Ages 10 and up) | Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books | 416 pp. | $18.99