An epic story of a woman who was born in the wrong time with the wrong skin and the wrong gender (as she describes herself), this book gives us a female equivalent of the legendary figures who settled the west. Rosa Rendon has a story every bit as unbelievable as Daniel Boone's or Kit Carson's.

The book is set in Trinidad and the American west in the early 19th century, amidst the conjunction of Africans - free and enslaved - native Americans, and Europeans. There is no simple black and white; almost every character is a hyphenated mixture of some sort (European-Native American, African-European, etc.), and the sequences in Trinidad, focused on a free African family trying to remain so in the face of Spanish/French/English competition, is heart-wrenching.

The book is well structured, told from three characters' viewpoints in a disjointed chronology; this is hard to do well, and the author pretty much nails it. The gender norms of the main characters are flipped. The female lead mostly has the emotional and narrative arc of the typical mountain man, and the male lead conforms mostly to feminine fictional tropes. This is unsettling in a good way.

While it's a fine story in simple narrative terms, it's also a strong light on our complicated racial past.

This book follows the character Rosa as a young girl in Trinidad to her married and living in Montana with the Apsáalooke tribe. I originally thought this would be a great read that I could possibly share with my students, however, I realized right away that it is not meant to share with my class (I teach 5th grade). The book is packed with a LOT of historical details, timelines changing back and forth, and a lot of very heavy events... that are realistic for the events of the time, however, they are pretty tough to read and definitely not appropriate for 5th graders (in my opinion). Although the story was a heavier read I felt it was very well written. If you are able to handle heavy events (rape, death, slavery, etc.) then this was a very interesting story that you would enjoy.

Thank you to NetGalley, Atlantic Monthly Press, and Lauren Francis-Sharma for an advanced copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

This book alternates between two story lines. Victor, the son of Rosa, lives with the Crow Nation in Montana. He is on the cusp of manhood and struggling to find his vision. A young Rosa, lives in Trinidad, where her family expects her to cook, clean, and take care of the household. Rosa's talents lie in running the field and working outside, putting her in conflict with her family.

This book was a very interesting mix of stories and cultures. I particularly enjoyed reading about Trinidad, a place I know virtually nothing about. The book did not have a true ending, which I found extremely frustrating. Overall, 4 out of 5 stars.

Victor has never exactly fit in. His best friend, Like-Wind, has the charm, talent, and personality that will take him far in their tribe. But Victor, the son of a chief, seems to lag behind his peers. The other boys have all received their vision, but Victor hasn’t.

When Like-Wind disappears for months after a winter hunt and returns with a runaway slave from another tribe, life as Victor knew it starts to shatter. A tragedy sends him and his mother on a quest to find answers. What Victor discovers changes his life forever.

Rosa Rendón has never exactly fit in. She loves her father’s horses and the land. When islanders on Spanish-controlled Trinidad look at her, they see a gangly black girl. While her older siblings, Jeremias and Eve, crave book learning and the elegant things of life, Rosa craves belonging. And her family, she never quite feels as if she belongs.

For one thing, she hates housework and school. She looks like her father, a free black man who runs a smithy. Eve and Jeremias take after their light-skinned, elegant mother. When the British take over the island, Everything Rosa and her father have worked for slowly starts to disappear.

Why I Liked This Book

This haunting tale spans decades, generations, and continents as Francis-Sharma tosses out story lines and weaves them together in a net that will catch your breath. It’s not the kind of book I like to read, but it’s the kind of book I need to read.

Erudite and fascinating, the Book of the Little Axe reveals the underbelly of emotions from a different point of view. Victor doesn’t fit in because his parents are blacks living in the Crow tribe in the 1830s. Rosa doesn’t fit in because she lives on an island where social decorum rules apply to even black-skinned girls.

Readers will identify with the longing to belong that both Rosa and Victor experience. Francis-Sharma also opens the reader’s eyes to the uneasiness and vulnerability that haunts those whose skin color doesn’t fall within two shades of the skin color of those in power. No matter how educated or knowledgeable a person may be, the world judges them based on the color of their skin.

Until we can see this fault in our logic, we won’t move forward in our quest for equality and truth-telling in history.

Rosa Rendón is a daughter of free black parents living in Trinidad in the late 1700s. She is strong-willed and balks against the expectations of a young woman in her society, preferring instead to work with the horses and land. Through a series of unfortunate circumstances, Rosa ends up living with the Crow Nation with her husband and children. When her oldest, Victor, continually fails to complete his vision quest to become a man, Rosa takes him on a quest to discover his roots. In the process, Rosa is forced to face her own past.

The narrative continually goes back and forth between past and present while also shifting between narrators. This lends quite a bit of confusion to the overall story, and it took until nearly halfway through for elements of the story to begin clicking into place to be making some sense. I went into this book with a high level of expectation based on the summaries I had read of the story, but walked away feeling somewhat let down.

I tried to like this book, and I think I succeeded for the most part. But it took a lot of bloody-mindedness on my part to get through the first few chapters. In historical fiction that spans two different timelines, I usually tend to like one timeline more than the other. Almost all the times, it would be the older timeline - things are just more compelling when its issues are more alien to me. But in this one, I preferred the later timeline, even though nothing much happened other than a boy slowly finding out the truth about who he is.

I picked it up for the colonial history, but it turned out to be more a family drama. That’s perfectly okay, but I could not care for the members of the Rendon family, Rosa included. I did not see the love and filial loyalty except maybe from Eve. They say “we is we” and mean to not just include the immediate family, but everyone who looks like them, but then they lose no opportunity to hurt and cause damage to each other. I felt genuinely sorry for both Jeremias and Eve. Eve whose own ambitions are thwarted first because her mother is ill and then because of prejudice, and so what if they are conventional ambitions. It doesn’t make them any less. (At least Rosa realizes this). Jeremias is never trusted, and while he’s not a nice man, he doesn’t deserve mistrust on that level.

I didn’t warm up to Rosa, but I did warm up to the story eventually. That’s because I really liked Creadon Rampley. Some of his story comes in the form of a diary he writes, and some of them in Rosa’s sections. He’s technically a sad sack who belongs nowhere and wants to make a life for himself with someone, and he gets tangled up with the Rendons. But he’s a wonderful voice to listen to, and a very easy character to sympathize with. He does so many things wrong, but I didn’t see much misrepresentation from him, especially from himself.

This book covers a time period in Trinidadian history when the English, who still owned slaves, took over from the French who had by then abolished slavery. This was really the hook that baited me into requesting the book, but it wasn’t very clear. There are references to mismanagement from the British and that bankruptcy of the country as a whole, and there’s an oblique mention about slaves being marched on the streets (implying that Trinidad was now a stop on the trans-Atlantic and trans-Caribbean slave trade?), but there’s never anyone really there on the scene. We’re told, not shown. This is really a book about the Rendons and if you connect with them, it’s an excellent book. I didn’t, so it’s only so-so.

This book was a slow burn. So much so that I almost thought I didn't like it... but it won me over in the end. What it all boils down to is that I've never read a book quite like this. A lover of historical fiction, this story put me in a time and place and among people I don't read a lot about - the Apsáalooke tribe and the island of Trinidad. It spanned years and countries and made you fall in love with and respect this tough as nails, take no prisoners woman who was born looking a little too like her African father on the island of Trinidad. Her name is Rosa Rendón and she is worth the 400 pages.

One of my biggest complaints about the book is that it starts us off with Rosa's son Victor and we view Rosa through the eyes of her self-absorbed and foolish son. It began the whole novel off on the wrong foot for me and made me feel like the story I was reading was not the story I was promised in the blurb. We also read the POV of Creadon Rampley, a man who's segments again draw away from the brilliant storyline of Rosa and her journey from Trinidad to America. Both Victor and Creadon are essential to the story and their POVs come full circle but for the first half of the novel, they made me feel like I was hearing about a powerful woman through the eyes of the men around her, instead of from her own mouth. This is all to say that the best of Francis-Sharma's writing is in the glorious bits of Rosa's POV.

From the start, we know that Rosa somehow ends up in America, partnered to an Apsáalooke man with three children. We're not sure how it's all going to play out but Francis-Sharma does a great job of unravelling all the stories in interesting and different manners. She is able to distinguish language patterns for all three characters and keep us blind to how they all connect until the end.

Rosa is a strong-ass woman. She is the youngest of three children, born to an African man and a French woman (potentially mixed? I am unclear). Her sister and brother were born with lighter skin and more widely considered "beautiful" features. Rosa looks like her father. She has dark skin and a wide nose - one which her mother makes her wear a clothespin on to help shape. She loves horses and her father and is the hardest working of her siblings, at least when it comes to the outdoor work. We get a complicated history of Trinidad through the eyes of this family. The island has been conquered by the Spanish, the French, and now the English. The white man is always in power yet many groups of African slaves, natives, etc have been brought to the island over the years to work. The Rendón's own land and Demas, the father, is a talented and respected blacksmith. They think they know their place among the inhabitants until the English take power and begin treating the island residents, especially those who are not white, like trash. There are complicated relationships between families, neighbors, and even siblings. With the insertion of Creadon Rampley, whom we've seen traipse across America running from bad bosses, murders, and on the lookout for a way to make a living, things get interesting.

This novel is a slow and heavy read until it picks up as things are revealed. It is perfect for any historical fiction lover (or even literary fiction lover) who craves new time periods, places, and people to learn about and experience.

I was given this free copy via NetGalley.com in exchange for my honest review. I felt myself a little disappointed by the format of the EBook. The spacing was really off on my Kindle (lines would end abruptly, only to continue a few lines later; the last 15 pages repeated 3 times before the pdf finally ended; the chapter and part headings were not spaced out well and confused my flow). I know this is an advanced copy and that those corrections are to come, I just felt it sometimes hindered my enjoyment of the book.

This is an epic tale that shifts time frame and countries, as well as narrators. Rosa is born in Trinidad to a family which would have been considered wealthy at the time- but that was before the events of the late 1770s, when the English came and all bets were off for "natives". She makes her way to Montana, where she becomes the wife of a Crow chief and the mother of Victor. Her travels with Victor in 1830 blend with her time In Trinidad and with the diary of Creadon Rampley, who was born to a Hudson Bay Company guide and his Indian wife. Those unfamiliar with the history of colonial era Trinidad will find the interesting; those not familiar will find it educational. There's wonderful atmospherics in all the places Victor, Rosa, and Creadon are. If you can't figure out how the stories will come together, trust that they will. There's a lot packed in here and the novel might have been better served with some trimming, especially in Trinidad, which feels like a whole novel until itself. That said, wonderful characters and an unusual plot make it a good read. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC.

I received a free electronic ARC of this excellent historical novel from Netgalley, Lauren Francis-Sharma, and publisher Grove Atlantic - Atlantic Monthly. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this novel of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. Lauren Francis-Sharma brings us a very well researched, historically accurate view into life in both Trinidad and Montana in the early years of the 1800s. Her characters are personable and honest, with that extra spice that brings them to life in the pages of this book.

Book of the Little Axe covers the period of 1796 - 1830, and follows Rosa Rendon from her family home on the Isle of Trinidad in the Caribbean as it goes through the growing pains of European control, first Spanish then the French, and finally British rule, and the effects that had on the Rendon family, father Demas a free black, mother Myra, a free mulatto, and their three children, oldest daughter Eva and youngest son Jeremias light complected like their mother, middle daughter Rosa black-skinned like her father. With each rollover of political control of the island, the family loses rights and property, eventually leading to the breakup of the family.

We follow Rosa with Creadon Rampley, who worked for the farm and blacksmith shop run by Demas in Trinidad, as they travel across the sea, across Mexico, and through the territories of the US to Kellyspell, a discarded military post located to the west of Apsaalooke Territory, in what would become Oregon Country. Rampley knew of the fort as he helped build it, and was there when it closed down. Rosa's father trusted him to get her to a safe place where Rosa would be able to be as independent as she wanted to be. That was never going to happen in Trinidad. There is a time of healing for both Rosa and Creadon at the old Post Kellyspell before Rosa meets Edward Rose and Rampley chooses to move on. Our tale is told from several first-person accounts and jogs back and forth through time but this is handled well and not too distracting. We hear from Rosa and her son, Victor, and the Creadon Rampley contributions are via his journal which Victor finds in the old military post where he and his mother find refuge after a vicious attack on them while Victor is seeking a vision quest. During his pre-teen years, Victor lived with the Amerindian tribe who called themselves Apsaalooke and were identified by the white man as the Crow tribe.
During Victor's time with the tribe, his mother Rosa was married to Edward Rose, a man of mixed heritage who had earned a place as a revered Apsaalooke war chief. Victor does not carry the black skin of his parents, looking more like his Aunt Eva and Grandmother Myra. He and Rosa spend months at the deserted military post while Victor heals broken bones and a heart that mourned his best friend, who was a part of the party who attacked them and raped his mother.

There is a LOT of history here, but it isn't pressed on the reader, just there if they find it interesting.
It is a compelling read for those of us who treasure history but also entertaining for the mystery fans out there.

pub date May 22, 2020
Grove Atlantic - Atlantic Monthly

Even if it's a well written story I found it slow and it didn't keep my attention.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

I received this quote from NetGallery.com for a honest review. Thank you, Netgalley.
This story had three story lines that were woven into the book. The story had a bit of a slow start, but then became a wonderful read. I appreciated the detail given to the characters and to the setting. Looking forward to another book along this lines!!!

Francis-Sharma is clearly a talented writer. The complex storyline moves back and forth in time, and this makes the story slow to build and hard to get into. Once I did finally get a cohesive picture of what was happening, I became much more invested and interested in the story. The historical insights around colonialism, slavery, native peoples, and racism in 19th century Trinidad and America were well written and interesting. I am not convinced that the structure of back and forth in the narrative works well here; I think it actually detracts. The character development felt incomplete.

HSPs this is not the book for you. In just the first half alone we have murder, suicide, lynching, rape, death, death, and wow more death. This made for a difficult read. I was invested in Rosa and Victor's stories, but found I had to keep taking short breaks because everything would be moving along and then something else graphic and awful would happen. I understand these elements really happened in history, but due to the way the story jumps through time and place, it's one assault after another and almost starts to feel implausible. The writing does nothing to shield you from the true horrors of these events, which is probably the correct way to handle them. But nor does the writing offer enough redemptive insights to make us fully want to see these characters through to the end. Because we're not sure it's worth it.

3.5 stars for a challenging work with some really excellent writing; this is a book that ultimately felt compelling and problematic all at the same time.

Thank you netgalley for the ARC.

This book was not my normal genre and it wasn't for me. I thought parts of the book were slow and it was really hard to hold my attention.

The story of Rosa Rendon captivates the audience with a variety of lives lived in one lifetime. Told from a variety of perspectives from different geographical locations, the story can be slow to start; however, the time spent in getting to know the characters is well spent.

While the book feels like it has a slow start, it also compels the reader to continue. By the middle of the book, I kept wondering what the characters were up to every time I had to put it down. This is not a time in history I am very familiar with and could be part of the reason I found the first portion tricky to understand the timeline and locations; however, the author makes up for that in the character development. The ending makes me wonder if there will be a series....I would not be disappointed if there was!

I received this from Netgalley.com for a review.

Following Rosa as a young adult in 1796 Trinidad to Rosa in 1830 living in Montana with an Indian tribe. This story is densely packed with historical detail which makes the story a heavier read.

2.75☆

This as a very good novel about a woman and her son on a quest to find his manhood, Rosa, originally from Trinidad was a rebellious child who worshipped her father and loved the land. Her father was a well respected blacksmith who also farmed.. Rosa worked the land with her father and refused woman’s work. When the English took over Trinidad life for the black family changed and her father was forced to make masks and chains for the slave trade. When her father did not make the order one time Rosa and her sister Eve, were attacked and forced to leave. Rosa goes to the America’s with her sister’s fiancé Craedon. They have a child Victor who is raised by another man in an Indian camp. When Victor gets older and doesn’t fit in his mother takes him on a journey back to where he was born. Their story is described by Rosa , Victor, and Craedon in such a way that you hear all three viewpoints.

Three character’s lives get braided into one tale in this book that takes readers from Montana to Trinidad and back to North America in the late 1700’s into the mid 1800’s.
Rosa comes from Trinidad, born into a free black family that owns a farm and blacksmith forge. When the British take control of the area, Rosa’s family faces possible loss of their property and way of life. Rosa flees to North America, where she hopes to find safety.
Victor is Rosa’s son, being raised in a Native American tribe after Rosa’s marriage to a war chief named Edward Rose. Victor and Rosa leave on a quest to help Victor enter manhood. It is during their time alone that Rosa tells Victor of her past.
Creadon Rampley is a drifter who travels from America to Trinidad where he meets Rosa’s family. The connection formed with the family will be a lasting one.
Book of the Little Axe is an insightful story into the many cultures that came together, not always by choice, during colonialism.

I felt like this book was longer than necessary. Some of the sections seemed to drag on. I did really love Rosa's story in Trinidad and found myself the most invested during these sections. The research and history in this book is impressive. The book is an interesting story about several different groups of people and how they connect.

Thank you to NetGalley, Atlantic Monthly Press and Lauren Francis-Sharma for the advanced copy of Book of the Little Axe in exchange for my honest review.

A unique narrative connecting colonial Trinidad to colonial US Territory focused on individuals straddling lines in every context in which they find themselves. I struggled to enjoy Victor's narrative as much as Rosa's narrative but an overall evocative, good book.

I loved this story about an uncommon topic, and the writing and language is so meticulous that it is necessary to take the time to read and enjoy. I want to know more about how much of the story is rooted in historical facts? Like, am I learning something from reading this or am I just entertained. Something I’d want to consider before recommending the title at school.

I couldn't get into this book, unfortunately and won't finish it. Part of the problem might have been the quality of the file, which I downloaded to Adobe Editions. Bluefire hasn't been working for me so well, the last few months or longer, with anything other than regular text not rendering. The file in AE reads like a pdf, rather than an ebook, in that I can't change the text size, and it's small. I can zoom out, but then to turn the page, I have to zoom back in, which is annoying.

Anyway, the book itself--I found the voice a little young for me.