Winner in the “Adventure: Historical” category at the 2019 American Fiction Awards
Silver for Historical Fiction in the 2019 Independent Publishers Awards
Finalist for Historical Fiction in the 2019 ForeWord Reviews “Book of the Year” Awards
Finalist for Historical Fiction in the 2019 International Book Awards
“Boston Teran writes with masterful skill, his words flowing with power and fury, his dialogue rich and painfully accurate, his tale one that describes a period (the book is set in 1851) fraught with danger, horror and cruelty told with a deft and delicate hand.”
– Lorenzo Carcaterra, New York Times bestselling author of SLEEPERS and THE WOLF
“Boston Teran’s A Child Went Forth is one of those rare novels that’s as much of an experience as it is a story. Poignant, immersive, at times heartbreaking, always entertaining, it deserves to be discussed in the same breath as Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, and seems destined to become a new American classic.”
– Russell Blake, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of dozens of action/adventure and mystery novels, including FATAL EXCHANGE and ZERO SUM
A CHILD WENT FORTH follows thirteen year old Charlie Griffin’s evolvement from boyhood to manhood in the summer of 1855 as he carries money from Brooklyn to Missouri to give it to the abolitionist leaders there. All the while he is being hunted by a ferocious crew of adversaries.
It is an entirely new look at the era, at slavery, racism, political and social corruptions and the cast of people in the novel are an illustrious roll call of characters from the real to the reimagined. From Walt Whitman to P.T. Barnum, to the Brooklyn evangelist and abolitionist Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The infamous and ghostlike undertaker and anti-slavery insurrectionist Erastus Eels. The millionaire gunfighter and freestater Butler Philips to his dashing and Oxford educated counterpart, the assassin Dixie Jack. And then there is Annie Pie, Charlie Griffin’s confidante, who at thirteen is brave beyond her years, and it is left to her to save him, the boy she has come to love.