Chains

Overview

Chains follows Isabel, a thirteen-year-old enslaved girl in British-occupied New York during the Revolutionary War. She and her younger sister Ruth were promised release upon their owner's death, but a legal sleight of hand instead delivers them to the Locktons, a couple who support the Crown and treat their human property with open contempt.

Separated from Ruth and desperate for any leverage over her own fate, Isabel is drawn into the world of Curzon, an enslaved young man aligned with the Patriot cause. He asks her to listen at the Locktons' table and carry what she hears to the rebels, a request that puts her at the center of a war she has no stake in choosing sides of. Her calculation is not about revolution but about who might actually help her go free.

As the novel moves through the hardships of a city under occupation, Isabel's decisions harden around a single question: which side, if either, will honor a promise made to someone with no power to enforce it. The story tracks her shifting allegiances as personal loss narrows her options and clarifies her priorities.

A Girl's War Inside the Nation's War

Anderson sets her protagonist's fight for freedom directly against the rhetoric of a nation fighting for its own, and the friction between those two struggles is the engine of the book. Patriots who speak fluently about liberty and tyranny own slaves without apparent contradiction, and Isabel's position lets her see that hypocrisy up close without commentary from the author telling readers what to make of it.

The novel also sits inside Anderson's broader body of work, which frequently centers teenage girls navigating institutions and adults who have power over their bodies and futures. Here that pattern is transposed onto a historical setting, and the research grounding the period details has been noted as a strength of the book, lending weight to a story that could otherwise read as a simple survival narrative. Isabel's arc, propelled by loss and by the unreliability of anyone claiming authority over her, gives the historical setting a personal stake that keeps the war from becoming mere backdrop.

Why Chains Has Been Challenged

Reviewers and educators have generally credited the novel for its unflinching, well-researched portrayal of enslaved life, yet that same directness is what has drawn objection from a small number of parents and school officials, who argue the material is too harsh for the age group it's shelved for. The challenges center on the book's depiction of the abuse, cruelty, and dehumanization Isabel and Ruth endure, content some reviewers consider necessary to an honest account of slavery and others consider unsuitable for younger middle-grade readers without more guidance or context.

A related strand of concern involves the book's frank treatment of racial violence and the language used to render it, which some have felt requires more classroom framing than it receives on its own. In the catalog tracked here, Chains has been the subject of challenges in 1 state and 1 school district, reflecting a narrow but real pattern of pushback against a book widely assigned for its historical value.