Escape Across the Wide Sea

On a crisp fall day in 1686, nine-year-old Daniel Bonnet's comfortable life is shattered when the king's soldiers destroy his family's weaving shop and threaten to murder his father. Now, because they are Huguenots, Protestants who refuse to convert to the king's religion, the Bonnets must flee France. In the ensuing violence, Daniel is left permanently maimed. Wounded and in severe pain, he embarks on an uncertain and courageous journey that will last more than two years and take him to Africa and the Caribbean on a slave ship, and finally to the colony of New York. In this stirring coming-of-age story about the founding of New Rochelle, New York, a boy must invent a new life for himself while confronting the challenges and moral complexities of slavery, inequality, and life with a disability.