Still Here - by Christine Duffy Zerillo (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Thunder in the waning light, not from the sky but from guns awakens two powerful women in the midst of the first Puritan War in America in 1675. Weetamoo, the powerful squaw sachem of the Pocasset Wampanoag people and Mary White Rowlandson, a prosperous minister's wife from Lancaster, Massachusetts Bay Colony, are swept up in the calamity of King Philip's War after both their homes are raided in bloody battles.

By reading between the lines of Rowlandson's own true captivity narrative and exhaustively researching historical records and Wampanoag oral tradition, author Christine Duffy Zerillo imagines how the two women survived together for eleven weeks during the bloodiest war of its time. After losing their homes, families, and friends in parallel events, they endured the challenges of winter, starvation, disease, and terror while relying upon one another for survival.

As their cultures collide and struggle to preserve their own ways of life, can Weetamoo and Mary learn from one another and see themselves as anything but sworn enemies? Or is their hatred and fear too deep-seated to find the common threads that bind them to one another.

Review Quotes

from Richard Panek

author, The Trouble with Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet

Christine Duffy Zerillo's meticulous research captures a pivotal moment in indigenous- colonial relations with impressively realistic detail, while her propulsive sense of pacing endows the seventeenth-century narrative with here-and-now vividness and suspense.

Still Here is a triumph of a historical novel.

from Kathy Chenault,

former UN- and Beijing-based correspondent for the Associated Press

Unflinching and eloquent, Still Here explores tragic days from American history-when those seeking to conquer new frontiers clashed with indigenous peoples refusing to yield. It details violent aggression and wrenching loss, despair that tested faith, and desperate struggles for identity. This powerful literary work provides an important historical record while conjuring haunting questions about enduring ethnic enmity in the United States.