Title: Forge
Author: Laurie Halse Anderson
# of Pages: 280
What a great way to spend a holiday: snuggled up in bed this morning until ten o’clock finishing my first book of the year. And then drinking a banana-chocolate smoothie and watching Big Bang Theory. Could life get any better? I submit that it could not.
Forge is the second book in the Chains trilogy that I started last month (unfortunately, the third book doesn’t come out until the end of this year, a fact I unfortunately didn’t know until AFTER I’d already finished reading the first two books of the trilogy). Whereas Chains is told from the point of view of Isabel, a headstrong, courageous young slave girl trying to escape to freedom during the Revolutionary War, Forge is told from the point of view of Curzon, a young slave boy who enlists with the army to fight the war and who tried to escape with Isabel in the first book. Forge tells the story of Curzon and Isabel’s continuing search for freedom, while outlining Curzon’s plight as a starving private in the Patriot army and Isabel’s plight as a branded slave once again. My favorite part of the book is, of course, the budding romance between Curzon and Isabel. One chapter was so cute that I leaned over, grabbed Matt, and started shaking him while saying, “That….is…..just…..so…..CUTE!” (To which he simply looked up from his own book, bewildered and confused).
As I said, no better way to spend a holiday.
Although I’m disappointed that I won’t be able to see how the trilogy ends until October of this year, I have loved these first two books and am impressed, as always, with Anderson’s ability to craft strong characters with unique writing voices and craft novels that are not only entertaining and suspenseful, but also thought-provoking and full of feeling. She continues to maintain her status as one of my all-time favorite authors of YA fiction.
My Rating: 5 stars
