Review of the novel The White by Deborah Larsen

The White is one of those singularly-affecting books that is also the only one its author has ever completed. Published in 2002, this evocative novel tells in lyrical and beautifully wandering detail the story of the real Mary Jemison, a Pennsylvanian frontier girl. She was captured by a Shawnee raiding party at 16 years old in 1758 and spirited away to be raised by two kind and quiet native women. Eventually she marries into the tribe and decides to remain the rest of her days among them. Real quotes from Jemison are intwined with the imagined narrative of her life so gorgeously and with what seems like effortless writerly grace. Despite what can be viewed as a white romanticization of an indigenous people and culture, Larsen sidesteps this understandable criticism of her story with a sensitive account of a life uniquely and truly well-lived.