Note: Thank you to Book Sirens and author Melissa Cole for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on Book Sirens. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

An untold story of the beginnings of the United States would be the sheer number of homeless children who were plucked from the streets of London and sold into indentured servitude against their will. A deep dive into this topic could have been very interesting. While Chains of Fate was entertaining, it was sorely lacking the depth it could have potentially had.

Thomas Everhart is one of a group of friends who live on the streets of London. The group finds themselves parentless for various reasons, but they stick together and look out for each other. All that changes one night when they are rounded up and brought to a ship to be sent as indentured servants to the colonies. Once there, they are sold to the owner of a Virginia tobacco plantation and are forced into hard labor. They bond with the slaves also being held at the plantation, even though their indenture has an end date while slavery is forever.

Thomas is seen as a leader among his friends. His late father had taught him woodworking, and he gets pulled from the fields to put his talent to use. Still, the backbreaking forced labor in the Virginia heat takes its toll. When one of the group dies of heatstroke after not being allowed to stop for water, they begin to plot to get away.

Chains of Fate could have been a deep dive into why this happened, and why it’s largely not acknowledged. Instead, it reads like a script for a television miniseries that was rewritten as a book. The characters lack the depth that readers should glean from a book’s details. Thomas seems wise beyond his years, especially for someone growing up on the streets of London. Other than some brief shows of temper, he seems to be nearly perfect in what he believes and how he acts. I kept waiting for a situation where his beliefs and morality would be challenged, but it never happened. We know about his friends but learn nothing of their backgrounds that led them to be living on the streets of London. All we get is that they are there and then they are taken to Virginia.

While Chains of Fate raises questions about the ethics of forced labor, especially in the shadow of the rich plantation owners wanting to throw off British authority in the name of “freedom,” it fails to deliver any real lesson as to what impact this labor had on the founding of the country. Thomas and two of his friends join the Continental Army as a way of earning their freedom. How many others fought for their own freedom this way? One of the policies that drove Virginia to join the other colonies in rebellion was the threat of the British giving freedom to any slaves who fought against the rebels. This is glanced over in a line or two where Thomas and his friends talk about signing up to fight. At first, I thought they might be joining the Loyalist side, but apparently, this was also true for the Continental Army, at least when it came to the white indentured servants.

The terms of their indenture are never fully established, and I found myself wondering if it would have been up anyway by the time they earned it fighting with the Continental Army. Many details like this are glossed over, which is problematic. I also had trouble with an uneven pace of time throughout the book. At times it was hard to follow. One minute a character is walking past autumn leaves and the next they are talking about magnolia blossoms. Another instance is when Thomas and his friends make the decision to runaway from the plantation and are being hunted down. One moment their pursuers are hot on their tail to the point that one of them gets shot. The next thing they have the time to stop and dig a grave. If they were close enough to get shot, wouldn’t they have been on them? The same thing with pursuing hounds that are there one minute, gone the next, then back again when it’s convenient.

Where the author excels is the setting. She describes the plantation and what life is like there quite well. Her descriptions of what it was like fighting for the Continental Army and the poor conditions those soldiers found themselves in are exceptional. Her descriptions are well done, just not as deep as I would have liked.

Chains of Fate is not a bad read, I just think there’s a lot of unrealized potential here. It’s a slice of history people don’t know much about, and other than making the reader aware that this type of forced indentured servitude existed, it doesn’t do much beyond that. The story was interesting and I did want to see how it ended, but I think I would look elsewhere for a better grasp on this issue.