Phillip Margolin, bestselling author of The Washington Trilogy, has written something a bit different this time around. Worthy Brown's Daughter is a novel of frontier justice based on a heart-breaking true story of racism in the 19th-century Oregon Territory. Today, Phillip has stopped by to chat a bit about his new book.
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Dear Librarians:
Worthy Brown’s Daughter is my first historical novel and one that I have worked on for thirty years. Inspired by Holmes v. Ford, an 1853 case from the Oregon Territory, the book is a labor of love that revolves around a young lawyer, still grieving over his beloved wife who drowned on the Oregon Trail, who tries to rescue the fifteen-year-old daughter of a freed slave from one of Oregon’s most powerful attorneys.
I was driven to write Worthy Brown’s Daughter after reading about the case in an article published by the Oregon Historical Society in 1983. But I knew very little Oregon history: What was the practice of law like in the 1800s? What was day-to-day life like? I had no clue, but I knew I had to find answers to these and many other questions if I was going to write a book that captured the tenor of 1860 Oregon. So I spent a lot of my spare time during the next six years in the library of the Oregon Historical Society and the Multnomah County Library reading journals, letters, and books about the times so I could make my book ring true.
Worthy Brown’s Daughter has all of the elements that make my contemporary legal thrillers fun to read but, at its heart, it is a serious novel that explores the effect of slavery on a fifteen-year-old girl and her struggle to become a strong, confident young woman; the grief experienced by a young man dealing with the loss of the woman he loves and the guilt he feels when he falls in love again; and a moral dilemma presented to two of the main characters which I have not seen in another novel. Writing this historical novel would not have been possible without the books I found in the Oregon Historical and Multnomah County libraries. I hope you like it.
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Thank you, Phillip!
If you'd like an egalley, be sure to request one on Edelweiss.
– Annie