Freedom Dues

Recipient of the 2021 Gold IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award Historical Fiction category. 1729: Blair Eakins is a fifteen-year-old Ulster Scot living in Ireland under the crushing weight of famine poverty and prejudice against his people. He commits himself as an indentured servant in Philadelphia for a term of four years. In London ten-year-old orphan pickpocket Mallie Ambrose is arrested for stealing a handkerchief. She is sentenced to Transportation bound into indentured servitude and exiled to Maryland for a term of seven years. Their paths eventually cross when they are acquired by the same owner. After Blair steps in to defend Mallie from their cruel master the two escape and head west finding unlikely allies among the Delaware Indians. But as fugitives without rights they live in constant fear of capture. Indra Zuno vividly portrays the terror and injustice of indentured servitude in pre-Revolutionary War America while championing the indomitable spirits of two strong survivors who struggle against monumental odds to find the freedom to love each other and control their destiny.