Bound
by Sally Gunning
List Price: $24.95
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780061240256
Publisher: William Morrow
Alice Cole spent her first seven years living in two smoky, crowded rooms in London with her family. But a new home and a better life waited in the colonies, or so her father promised --- a bright dream that turned to ashes when her brothers and mother took ill and died during the arduous voyage. Arriving in New England unable to meet the added expenses incurred by their misfortunes at sea, her father bound Alice into servitude to pay his debts.
By the age of fifteen, Alice can barely remember the time when she was not a servant to John Morton and his daughter, Nabby. Though work fills her days, life with the Mortons is pleasant; Mr. Morton calls Alice his "sweet, good girl," and Nabby, only three years older, is her friend, companion, and now newly married, her mistress.
But Nabby's marriage is not happy, and soon Alice is caught up in its storm; seeing nothing ahead but her own destruction, she defies her new master and the law and runs away to Boston. There she meets a sympathetic widow named Lyddie Berry and her lawyer companion, Eben Freeman. Frightened and alone, Alice impulsively stows away on their ship to Satucket on Cape Cod, where the Widow Berry offers Alice a bed and a job making cloth in support of the new boycott of British wool and linen.
At Widow Berry's, Alice believes her old secret is safe, until it becomes threatened by a new one. As the days pass, the political and the personal stakes rise and intertwine, ultimately setting off a chain of events that will force Alice to question all she thought she knew. Bound by law, society, and her own heart, Alice soon discovers that freedom --- as well as gratitude, friendship, trust, and love --- has a price far higher than any she ever imagined.
Library Journal hailed Sally Gunning's previous novel, The Widow's War, as "historical fiction at its best." With Bound, this wonderfully talented writer returns to pre-Revolutionary New England and evokes a long-ago time filled with uncertainty, hardship, and promise.
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1. Bound explores the different kinds of ties that bind one person to another. Of the various bonds explored in this novel, which ones do you feel should have been preserved? Which broken?
2. Alice is a person both old and young for her age. In what ways do you feel she mature and in what ways immature?
3. How would you describe Alice's expectations of life? How do you see these changing through in the course of the book?
4. Do you think Alice feels sorry for herself? Why or why not?
5. Alice refers several times to the idea that a man's eyes are on her. Do you think all men's eyes really are on Alice, or does she just perceive it to be so?
6. In the beginning of the book Nate greatly admires Freeman. Toward the end he appears to become disillusioned. What do you think causes this change? How do you think he feels about Freeman at the end?
7. Do you feel Mr. Morton deserves Alice's prayers?
8. Do agree with Nate's opinion that Freeman would have surely ended up “touching” Alice? Do you think Nate really believes this? If he doesn't, why does he say it?
9. Discuss what Alice wants/needs from Freeman and whether it would be possible to achieve.
10. Do you think Nate really planned to go to Pownalborough?
11. Can you think of reasons Alice hasn't considered that Lyddie might consider as she debates whether to give up her dower right and marry Freeman?
12. Do you see Lyddie Berry's and Eben Freeman's feelings toward Alice changing through the course of the novel? If so, how and why?
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“[A] page-turner . . . Gunning weaves a horrifying, spellbinding story of colonial indenture's cruelties and a meditation on the meaning of freedom.”
—Publishers Weekly
"If The Widow's War identified Sally Gunning as a masterful new voice in historical fiction, Bound confirms her place as one of the very best in the field. Beautifully researched and ardently imagined, Gunning's writing is so vivid you can taste the salt in the Cape Cod air. She has a special gift for rendering the spare, constrained dialogue of the colonial Puritans and at the same time giving her characters emotional lives that are rich, moving and utterly convincing. Her Satucket novels are destined to become classics."
—Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Year of Wonders and March
"Two hundred years ago, Cape Cod was not a haven for visitors in sun hats with boxes of fudge. It was an unforgiving spit of sand, where women's lives were as harsh as those of the men who went down to the sea in ships and came back in shrouds. In her novel of pitiless beauty, Bound, author Sally Gunning demonstrates again what she did in The Widow's War. Unlike many historical novelists, Gunning makes the long-ago feel like this very day. Elegantly, she tells bitter truths #8212;that dignity and grace and even abiding love can flourish where it seems nothing can grow."
—Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and Still Summer
“Bound is an insightful look back at the horrors of the late colonial period's indentured servant system . . . Sally Gunning provides a well written thought provoking mid-eighteenth century thriller.”
—Midwest Book Review
