Book of the Week (6/16/2025)

Outcasts of Essex by Jane Hulse (Open Books Publishing, 2025)

Essex, New Hampshire, April 1775

Fifteen-year-old Sarah Barrett hates the mess of childbirth, yet she's the unwilling apprentice to the town's only midwife-her mother. She longs to be a writer like her father, who publishes the weekly Essex Journal. 

As the American Revolution heats up, his pro-British views turn the town against the family. Troubles deepen when a smallpox epidemic hits the town, and her mother pushes a crude, controversial inoculation. 

Sarah finds herself questioning everything: the fight for independence, her father's judgment, her own failings, and more to the point, why it's considered unthinkable for a young woman to write for a newspaper. 

When she learns the redcoats and the patriots will soon clash over a stockpile of munitions in Essex, she comes up with a risky plan to thwart the bloodbath. --Publisher's blurb

About the author:

Growing up in Keene, New Hampshire, Jane Hulse was surrounded by history. From her family's 1795 home, she could see the former tavern where 29 Minutemen rallied before fighting the British at Lexington. With her father, she explored caves that served as hiding places for loyalists who had been hounded out of town during the American Revolution. After graduating from Syracuse University, Hulse worked for small newspapers in Colorado and then for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, where she covered major criminal trials. She did freelance writing for the Los Angeles Times and was city editor at the Santa Barbara News-Press. For her leadership there, she was one of six staffers who received the University of Oregon's Arcil Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism, an annual honor for journalists who "report with integrity despite personal, political, or economic pressure." Most recently, she was editor of a Southern California agricultural magazine.