New Books Network Interview: Sandra Freels

I must admit: when Sandra Freels’s publicist approached me about her debut novel, Anneke Jans in the New World, I agreed to a New Books Network interview only in part because the novel’s focus on the Dutch colony that became New York rather than the more familiar English and French colonization intrigued me.

The bigger draw was Sandra Freels herself. Like me, she spent most of her career studying Russia—language and literature in her case, history in mine—and we have numerous shared contacts, although we were never in the same place at the same time.

As for how she came to write a novel that has nothing to do with Russia, you can find the answer to that question by listening to our conversation.

As always, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.

With the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America fast approaching, I expect at least a small flood of novels set in the early days of colonization and statehood. This one stands out because, rather than focus on the Puritans or the revolution and the founding of the nation, it explores the life of the author’s ancestor, who joined the fledgling Dutch colony known as Fort Amsterdam between 1630 and 1663. This is New York City as you can’t imagine it, an outpost on the mighty Hudson, surrounded by forest and mountains, with not a skyscraper or even a paved street to be seen.

Anneke crosses the ocean with her husband, Roelof Jans, under the auspices of the Dutch West India Company, which in the seventeenth century was expanding all over the globe. Roelof, a former sailor, sees the opportunity to settle down as a landowner in the New World, and Anneke joins him at the urging of her mother—who both wants to see her daughter settled and establish a beachhead for herself as a future midwife to the new colony. Eventually, the whole family emigrates, and the novel follows Anneke through numerous personal upheavals and joys amid the gradual disintegration of Fort Amsterdam’s relationship with the Native American nations surrounding the fort.

This is pure historical fiction in its focus on one central character and the many evolving relationships that define her life. It works because Anneke herself is such a well-thought-out and appealing person, and that—as well as the richly portrayed and, to me, relatively unfamiliar world that surrounds her—kept me turning pages as fast as I could.