Kate McCafferty

Tedious, monotonous and to me, unbelievable. I knkow it's fiction, but it's not fantasy. I think it should be somewhat believable.
A man is hired by the Governor of Barbados to write the story of the Irish Slave girl.
Would someone actually spend four days writing the life story of this Irish Slave about how and why she came to be transporting guns?
At the time the book takes place I didn't think so. In America the abolitionists took the time to record the stories of the slaves. But they were working for a cause. This Governor of Barbados and the interviewer seems to have such disdain for the Irish Slave it just didn't work for me.
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After her arrest for aiding a slave insurrection on Barbados, middle aged Cot Daley is subjected to a lengthy interrogation. She agrees to provide information on the rebellious slaves only if she is allowed to tell her story in her own way. Beginning with her Irish childhood, Cot tells of her kidnapping and transport to Barbados, her sale as an indentured servant, the many extensions to her years of indenture that gave her no hope of freedom until she reached middle age, and her marriage to an African slave, a Coromantee Muslim.

The book is essentially a long monologue only occasionally broken by the thoughts and actions of the interrogator, Peter Coote. By the end of the book, my sympathies were with Coote. I just wanted her to get to the end of her story. Cot didn't have the charisma to carry off such a long tale. I think I would have liked this better as a movie, since in a movie other characters would get to speak for themselves instead of through Cot.… (más)

Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl is a fictitious account of the common 16th century practice of kidnapping Irish people to work as slaves on Caribbean plantations. Cot is captured, shipped and sold into slavery at about age 10; she lives among other Irish and African slaves, working sunup to sundown in sugar cane fields, often cold, always hungry, and never properly clothed. When she reaches sexual maturity, Cot is used as a breeder to increase her owner's holdings, but her children die or are taken from her and sold. She tells her story to an indifferent marshal at the end of her life - he listens in hopes of extracting information about slave revolts brought about with collaboration between Irish and African plantation workers. The story feels bleak and hopeless - separated from family and country, Cot is unloved, uncared for and virtually unnoticed all her life.… (más)