The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor: The First Woman Settler of the Miramichi.

Randall White is the author of Voice of Region: On the Long Journey to
Senate Reform in Canada, Too Good to Be True: Toronto in the 1920s, and
Global Spin: Probing the Globalization Debate.

Armstrong’s semi-fictional biography of her great-great-great-grandmother was hard to put down. As she tells us in her afterword, Armstrong began Charlotte’s story as a “straightforward non-fiction account as her contribution to New Brunswick’s history but shifted to a semi-fictional mode when she realized there were too many ‘missing links.’” A wise decision, for this experienced writer matched her investigative journalism skills with a lively and imaginative writing style to achieve a work that will reach a far wider audience that any non-fictional history would.

What a subject and what a story: a young woman who ran away with her parents’ black butler with the intention of starting a new life (with an unborn child) in Jamaica. Her beloved Pad died from a plague five days after they had landed, and the plucky and hardy Charlotte is befriended by an English captain who promises to take her back home, but first his ship would be stopping at Nepisiguit, a British trading post near the Gulf of St. Lawrence in what was still Nova Scotia. Nepisiguit and the surrounding area would be Charlotte’s home for the rest of her long and eventful life. Her first child is born after she takes refuge with the Mi’kmaq, where she falls in love with but never marries the handsome Wioche. She does marry three times, has eight more children, sees most of them settling their own families nearby, and has a front-row seat on several momentous historic events: the growth of settlements by the Acadians who had escaped the Expulsion, the American Revolutionary War, the arrival of United Empire Loyalists, and the establishment of the province of New Brunswick.

All this is told through the eyes and words (some from diary excerpts and others created by the author) of Charlotte, a true heroine brought back to life. Armstrong has every right to be proud of her amazing ancestor; she should also take a big bow for reconstructing this believable and exciting slice of New Brunswick history.