Book Review: Flight of the Sparrow by Amy Belding Brown 

About a third of the way through Thetford author Amy Belding Brown's Flight of the Sparrow, the novel appears to settle in to a standard chick-lit narrative. The Puritan heroine, Mary Rowlandson, is abducted by Native Americans from her Massachusetts Bay Colony home in a violent raid. During her three-month-long nomadic captivity, a tall, English-speaking Indian named James appears at key moments to protect her. Soon, she "completely surrender[s] to the consolation of his presence ... of his body."

Thank goodness the story changes course. Perhaps it had to: Brown based her novel on the real Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative about her abduction by the Nipmuc and Narragansett tribes in 1675, which ends with her restoration. Sometimes called the country's first bestseller, Rowlandson's full account is online and still fascinating to read more than 300 years later. Brown's story, told in third person and present tense, expands Rowlandson's condensed account and continues beyond it, as the author imagines how dramatically changed her heroine — a properly submissive minister's wife and mother of three — might have been by her experience.

In Flight of the Sparrow, those changes have a very modern ring. Mary, enslaved to the tribe's female leader, Weetamoo, witnesses the sachem wielding an authority over men that the goodwife never thought possible. And, despite the disembowelments and infant bashings she witnessed during the raid, Mary notes the Indians' generosities: The men never rape female abductees; the women raise their children without harsh discipline; food is shared equally among everyone, from slave to sachem, even in times of near-starvation.

Thrust into an environment where the Puritan God seems absent, Brown's Mary begins to question her religion. Pieties she has always uttered in good faith — "The Lord is merciful and kind and greatly to be praised" — sound increasingly like "mere habit" to her. By the time she is ransomed back to the settlers, she no longer wants to return to her former life.

And no wonder: The author, herself a minister's wife, makes the kind of Christianity the Puritans fled England to practice look practically malicious. Mary's husband, Joseph, is the worst. "You are tainting my ministry!" he roars after learning Mary has helped a woman give birth out of wedlock. After her experience of being enslaved, Mary refuses Joseph's suggestion that she take on one of the defeated Indians as a house slave — a common practice among the Puritans, who also kept and sold African Americans. Joseph is enraged at her defiance and reads her "long verses of Scripture that justify the keeping of slaves" while she stands with head bowed.

In one of the novel's most convincing twists, Mary writes her now-famous narrative under pressure from her husband. Joseph wants to restore his reputation in the community as a paragon of faith — a status now threatened by his tie to a woman presumably violated by savages and given to new and strange habits, such as enjoying nature in solitude. Brown couldn't have thought of a better way to skewer colonial Christianity.

Mary's incipient feminism, abolitionism and especially secularism seem like themes more geared toward gratifying the modern reader than toward illuminating 17th-century colonial life. Brown explored the first two of those themes in her earlier novel Mr. Emerson's Wife — published by Macmillan, and praised by authors Geraldine Brooks and Susan Cheever — whose 19th-century setting makes such concerns more believable. As for Mary's questioning of faith, in an author interview included in the book, Brown explains that the religious commentary and biblical quotes that infuse Rowlandson's account struck her as "layers" added to the original, fast-moving story of the Puritan's experience.

Rowlandson's narrative actually casts her experience as a spiritual test. But it's easy to understand the impulse to fictionalize: Who's to say the woman didn't feel internal or external pressure to shape her story according to the beliefs of the day? Brown goes one step further, ascribing the narrative's religious commentary wholly to Mary's editor, the shrewd and patriarchal Increase Mather. The author made a similar leap in Mr. Emerson's Wife, portraying the historical close friendship between Lidian Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as an affair.

Rather than religion, this Mary's guiding light becomes James, who acquired his flawless English (in Brown's rendering) as a printer's apprentice. Brown's debut novel was a romance called Island Summer Love, and she hasn't quite left the genre behind. Flight too often reaches for romantic clichés that blend, disturbingly, with clichés about Native Americans: James' "sorrowful gaze [is] like an arrow, piercing her"; he "gazes past Mary at the budding trees, as if he can see through their branches into the future."

James gradually transforms from ideal lover to spokesperson for humanism, voicing astute critiques of the settlers' insularity and cruelty. Brown's writing is the kind that leaves no mystery about how characters feel from moment to moment; nothing is hinted at or left for the reader to fill in. When a new love interest, Samuel, begins courting Mary, "He tells Mary that he admires her steadfastness as well as her passionate spirit." Such a style makes for quick reading, if nothing else.

What does remain with the reader after finishing Flight of the Sparrows are the startling particulars of the colonists' treatment of the Indians after they crushed the rebellion during which Rowlandson was captured. Called King Philip's War, after the Wampanoag tribe's sachem Metacomet who led it (known to the British as King Philip), the conflict broke out after decades of peace and even friendship between the two cultures. Its catalyst was the Indians' too-accurate realization that the land grab would never end. Brown's book helps bring that pivotal, and morally fraught, time in the country's founding back to life.

The original print version of this article was headlined "False Deliverance"