Flight of the Sparrow by Amy Belding Brown

“She begins to accept the fact that he will not come for her and her affection for him shrivels.” This is a key moment, surely worth exploration. Instead of using metaphor, memory, or sensory clues to show what Mary feels, Brown offers summaries, full of rhetorical questions and bald statements.

The writing also bothers me, especially the emotional transitions. He’s crucial to the themes, plot, and politics of the narrative, and he reflects her conscience, but I wanted more. Likewise, the baptized Indian man, James, who protects Mary as best he can, seems more like a representative than a full person. It would have made him more sympathetic, and a true match for Mary. There are hints, here and there, of vanities, desires, and weaknesses, but I wish she’d explored them. To say that he’s a Calvinist preacher or a man of his time and place gives Brown leeway at first, but sooner or later, she has to show us more to keep him a plausible character with more than one dimension. Her husband’s fire-and-brimstone persona wears thin after a while, because you can’t tell what sin and salvation actually mean to him, or why he has his particular take. For theme and scope, Flight of the Sparrow deserves an audience.īut in other ways, this is an artless, frustrating novel. I knew very little of this subject, so I was pleased to read her thoughtful, thought-provoking narrative. It’s a generally sympathetic portrait, but a mixed one, and I believe it, as I do her portrayal of colonial ways. To her credit, Brown airbrushes nothing, seeking neither to excuse nor obscure the gruesome violence Mary witnesses, nor to patronize the Native Americans as noble savages. You sense that she’ll somehow resume her former life, and you want to know how she’ll deal with that, or how the other colonists will view her. She’s a captive, yet her definition of freedom (and relationship with God) will never be the same. Though Mary dreams of returning to colonial society and her husband, Joseph–whose absence the day of the raid saved his life–she begins to rethink who she is and what she wants, questions she’s never asked herself. Mary learns that many aspects of native life compare favorably with her own, including kind playfulness toward children, the willingness to share, greater respect for women, and, perhaps most of all, the expression of deep, unconstrained feeling.

No surprise there, but what Brown does with that gives rich thematic scope to her narrative. Her church teaching has reinforced the common assumption among the English colonists that the devil drives Native American life, and that heathen depravity makes Indians less than human. The Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the U.S.)īut Mary’s captivity involves much more than trauma, which is why Flight of the Sparrow is a fascinating book.

Flight of the Sparrow by Amy Belding Brown