Gripping from its opening scene.

Working with a chaotic and often confusing historical record, DeJean traces the constellation of forces — including avarice, corruption and misogyny — that permitted the rapid roundup of another 96 or so female prisoners to be transported in the dank hold of La Mutine. The horrific conditions of the women’s journey, and the will to survive that must have sustained them when they were set down, largely without resources, in a barren, swampy, inhospitable land, are evoked in vivid detail.

DeJean does a wonderful job of tracing the lives of these women through government and parish records, plotting their marriages, deaths, births and financial fortunes through succeeding decades.

With rich writing, author and University of Pennsylvania professor DeJean gives the women who settled Louisiana, and their lost stories, a long-overdue historical reckoning..

A welcome retelling of a forgotten segment of American history.

... intriguing.