One Day's Tale

One Day’s Tale is a historical adventure and journey of discovery by Betsy Randall, a young early-18th Century English wife and mother who, after witnessing pirates murder her husband and children, must recreate herself in colonial Virginia, a strange, dangerous and beautiful land where Europeans, Africans, and Indians are forging a nation amidst the brutality of slavery, the dangers of a wilderness with wild animals and Indian uprisings, and the culture of a society that cherishes books, harpsichords and carefully tended gardens. It is a literary novel that features three strong female characters in addition to Betsy, the protagonist: Phillipa, a young, vivacious and strong-willed belle of Virginia society who adopts Betsy as her “sister”; Charity, also young, vivacious and strong-willed, and Phillipa's personal slave, companion and lover; and Deborah, a slave who taught herself to read and play the harpsichord, bore two children by her late master (Betsy's brother-in-law) and now is the de facto manager of his large and elegant plantation. That plantation is the inheritance that Betsy's husband uprooted his family from England to claim. Betsy, having suffered an unspeakable tragedy and being thrust into a world she had never imagined existed, learns from these women and other people (a cabin boy, a ship's doctor, a handsome German woodsman, an escaped slave living wild in the forest, and more) to confront the dangers and moral dilemmas presented by that world before becoming the woman who will live, indeed thrive, in this new land.

One Day's Tale (the title is from the 19th Psalm) is similar to Toni Morrison's A Mercy in its representation of the diversity of colonial Americans. The treatment of slavery in One Day’s Tale may also remind readers of Edward P. Jones's The Known World.