Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl - Tapa dura

McCafferty's haunting novel chronicles an overlooked chapter in the annals of human slavery... Abducted at the age of 10, Cot Daley is subjected to one bewildering indignity after another as she is sold and resold as both a house servant and a field hand. Eventually incarcerated for her participation in a mixed-race slave revolt, she is questioned by Peter Coote, an English physician commissioned by the governor to evaluate the utility of the various races of slaves residing in Barbados... Cot recounts her life as a slave, her marriage to a proud African rebel, and her role in a noble, but doomed, uprising against the brutal plantation owners. A meticulously researched piece of historical fiction that will keep readers both horrified and mesmerized. --Booklist

McCafferty's imagined oral record is convincing - a harrowing tale about events too long ignored by textbooks. --Los Angeles Time

McCafferty does a remarkably vivid and thorough job of portraying what life was like for the indentured Irish. --Boston Globe

This is the story of Cot Daley, a young girl kidnapped from her home in Galway, and shipped out to Barbados, where more than fifty thousand Irish sold to as indentured servants to the plantation owners of the Caribbean work the land alongside African slaves. Most of them would never see their families again.