The White

In 1758 when Mary Jemison is about sixteen a Shawnee raiding party captures her Irish family near Gettysburg Pennsylvania. Mary is the only one not killed and scalped. She is instead given to two Seneca sisters to replace their brother who was killed by whites. Emerging slowly from shock Mary--now named Two-Falling-Voices--begins to make her home in Seneca culture and the wild landscape. She goes on to marry a Delaware then a Seneca and though she contemplates it several times never rejoins white society. Larsen alludes beautifully to the way Mary apprehends the brutality of both the white colonists and the native tribes; and how open-eyed and independent she thrives as a genuine American.