FIVE SISTERS. FOUR ARE KIDNAPPED.

ONE GOES AFTER THEM.

ALL THEIR LIVES ARE CHANGED FOREVER.

“… a hypnotic, capacious, and cutting evocation of a bleak period of American history.”

– Kirkus Reviews

On a humid day in June 1806, on the edge of Ohio's Great Black Swamp, seventeen-year-old Susanna Quiner watches from behind a maple tree as a band of Potawatomi Indians kidnaps her four older sisters from their cabin. With both her parents dead from Swamp Fever and all the other settlers out in their fields, Susanna makes the rash decision to pursue them herself. What follows is a young woman's quest to find her sisters, and the parallel story of her sisters' new lives.

The frontier wilderness that Susanna must cross in order to find her sisters is filled with dangers, but Susanna, armed with superstition and belief in her own good luck, sets out with a naive optimism. Over the next five months, Susanna tans hides in a Moravian missionary village; escapes down a river with a young native girl; discovers an eccentric white woman raising chickens in the middle of the Great Black Swamp; suffers from snakebite and near starvation; steals elk meat from wolves; and becomes a servant in a Native American village. The vast Great Black Swamp near Toledo, Ohio, which was once nearly the size of Connecticut, proves a formidable enemy. But help comes from unlikely characters, both Native American and white.

The man who loves Susanna, Seth Spendlove, is in pursuit after he realizes that his father was involved in the kidnapping. Part Potawatomi himself but living a white man’s life, Seth unwittingly sets off on his own personal journey to reclaim his birthright. He allies himself with a Native American named Koman, one of the band of men who originally abducted the Quiner sisters, but who now wishes to make his own retribution. Together they canoe through the Great Black Swamp and into enemy territory looking for Susanna, and while they travel Koman teaches Seth about their shared Potawatomi heritage.

As Susanna makes her way through the uncharted pioneer wilderness, she transforms into a capable woman who endures starvation, snakebite, and leech-infested waters in order to find her family. And against all odds she does find them, although they too have changed: one has found religion, one has fallen in love with a Native American man and lives with his family, and one has been sold to a brutal backwoodsman on the River Raisin.

Both a quest tale and a tale of personal transformations, Thieving Forest follows five pioneer women and one man as they contend with starvation, slavery, betrayal, and love. It paints a startling new picture of life in frontier Ohio with its mix of European and Native American communities, along with compelling descriptions of their daily lives. Fast-paced, richly detailed, with a panoramic view of cultures and people, this is a story of a bygone era sure to enthrall and delight.