6 April 2025 REBELLION 1776 by Laurie Halse Anderson, Simon & Schuster/Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy, April 2025, 416p., ISBN: 978-1-4169-6826-9

“Inoculation is the act of implanting a pathogen or microbe into a person or other recipient; vaccination is the act of implanting or giving someone a vaccine specifically.”

— Wikipedia

“A steadfast figure in the anti-vaccine movement who has helped shape Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s thinking on a possible link to autism has joined his department to work on a study examining the long-debunked theory, according to people familiar with the matter.

The new analyst, David Geier, has published numerous articles in the medical literature attempting to tie mercury in vaccines to autism. In 2012, state authorities in Maryland found that he had been practicing medicine without a license alongside his father, Mark Geier, who was a doctor at the time.

Maryland authorities also suspended Mark Geier’s medical license following claims that he endangered children with autism and exploited their parents, according to state records.”

– NYT (3/27/25)

“The Food and Drug Administration's top vaccine regulator was forced out of the agency Friday and sharply criticized Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his boss at the Department of Health and Human Services.

‘It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,’ Dr. Peter Marks wrote in his letter of resignation”

– NPR (3/28/25)

In Laurie Halse Anderson’s latest, REBELLION 1776, we meet characters who, as was the practice back then, are inoculated with a knife scratch and some pus from a smallpox patient’s pox.  The inoculated children and adults subsequently endure aches, pains, and pox. But this controlled, limited, and planned viral infection yielded a less-dangerous case of the disease. It’s a matter of serious discomfort rather than death. Smallpox inoculation provided colonial-era Americans lifelong immunity against suffering from the disease in its full-blown, deadly form. 

Inoculation was a potentially dangerous practice, in large part because any failure to adequately separate inoculated and symptomatic people from uninoculated people could lead to uninoculated people becoming accidentally infected and possibly facing deadly, full-blown cases of the virus. 

The author’s graphic account of a character’s developing such a full-blown case of smallpox in this manner is one of several situations that are described so well that readers can see, smell, and feel the discomfort and agony.

(Thankfully, while stockpiles of smallpox vaccine still exist, the disease has now been eradicated worldwide, and so it has been a long time since those vaccinations were routinely performed.

“I’d hoped to find Pappa sound asleep, but his bedchamber at the top of the stairs was empty. More than empty; no blankets lay on his bed, no clothes hung on the pegs. His books and tools were missing too. He must have stowed his gear aboard ship before he came for me. But how could he find work without his tools? Regret began gnawing my insides; I’d never thought about that when I made my plan to hide.

‘Help.’ The hoarse whisper came from the other bedchamber. ‘Please. Help me.’

I froze. It didn’t sound like Pappa, but clearly someone was in distress. Crossing the hall, I opened the door to the other bedchamber, and gasped. The small, dim room reeked of urine, puke, and disease. One bed held a man curled on his side, facing the wall. The fellow in the other bed, lying on his back, croaked, ‘Water.’

I took a breath and gagged. ‘Twas not the smell of ordinary sickness; ‘twas smallpox.

The stench unlocked my worst memories: Momma, my brothers, and my wee baby sister…their room smelled like this.

Stop! Don’t think of them!

I fled. Halfway down the stairs, my knees buckled, forcing me to sit. I buried my face in my hands, rocking back and forth, trying not to see them again, trying  to forget my helplessness, the horrid sounds of their moans and the unbearable silence that followed. 

‘I beg you.’ The man’s voice had grown louder with desperation. ‘Please, miss!’

Stop it, stop it! I covered my ears and rocked faster. ‘Twas not my place to care for strangers.

Then, an unbidden thought pierced my heart.

Momma would help him.

She’d caught smallpox by helping a neighbor who had a terrible fever and aches in her bones. By the time the pox appeared on the sick woman, days later, Momma was already infected. She’d grown sick first, then Jacob and Toby, and baby Keziah. I tried to be a good nurse to them, but then the pox came for me, leaving me bedridden and helpless as the speckled monster took them. one by one. Pappa, who’d had the pox as a boy, built their coffins.

I rocked harder still, tears washing down my face. My heart shattered all over again.

‘Just water, miss,’ called the man. ‘I beg you.

Smallpox patients crave water to soothe their parched throats and chapped mouths. How long had it been since anyone had brought drink or food to those two? Where was Missus Stone?”

Oh, yeah. The man facing away on the other bed, across from the parched, pleading guy? He’s already dead from the virus.

With the COVID pandemic still raw and smarting in our minds, Laurie Halse Anderson has crafted a powerful, impeccably-researched, colonial-era America tale plagued by the overhanging threat of smallpox.

Set in Boston in the year that independence was declared, REBELLION 1776 begins as British soldiers and Loyalists are about to be forced to leave town, thanks to George Washington’s successful strategy of besieging the city with Patriot cannons. Washington has successfully turned the Brits and Co. into sitting ducks. 

Twelve-year-old Elsbeth Culpepper has been serving curmudgeonly old British Judge Bellingham (Judge Corkbrain, as she refers to him) in exchange for food and a place to sleep. This while her father resides at Missus Stone’s boarding house and engages in sailmaking. The pain is still raw for father and daughter, having left those wooden coffins with mother and siblings buried back in Philadelphia.

In light of Washington’s tactical success, Pappa’s latest plan involves their sailing back across the Atlantic in order to deliver Elsbeth to her late mom’s people in Scotland. Elsbeth, who opposes that plan, immediately devises her own counter-plan: Hide when Pappa sets his plan in motion. The unintended consequences of Elsbeth’s apparently successful ruse is that she now has not the vaguest idea whether or not Pappa actually made it over to Judge Corkbrain’s otherwise-abandoned house to collect her; whether Pappa has since sailed without her; or whether or not he’s even still alive.

Meanwhile, at the judge’s house, Mister Pike has taken up residence. He has just completed a prison term for spying on the Royalists on behalf of the Patriots. His wife and kids soon join him there. Under the care of the Pikes is teenaged, orphaned, Miss Hannah Sparhawk, who soon becomes a combination of Elbeth’s employer, friend and co-conspirator. 

“What was the point of ever dreaming of  a joyful future when pestilence and war took such delight in killing thousands with a single breath? What was the point of living at all if it was doomed to end in pain and sorrow?”

REBELLION 1776 is the story of Elsbeth and Hannah living amidst family, the American Revolution and War, soldiers, scoundrels, and the smallpox epidemic. It is powerful, gritty, filled with colorful colonial language, and unquestionably award-worthy.

Huzzah!

Richie Partington, MLIS

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