South Puget Sound, WA – Acclaimed children’s author M. E. Torrey makes her debut in adult fiction with Fox Creek, a sweeping, unflinching historical novel that confronts the brutal realities of slavery while bringing fresh humanity and moral depth to one of America’s most fraught eras.
Early praise has been resounding. Kirkus Reviews awarded Fox Creek a coveted starred review, calling it “a rich, engrossing tale about the antebellum South that delivers indelible characters.” San Francisco Book Review hailed it as “among the most powerful depictions of the Old South I’ve encountered—unflinching, layered, and keenly aware of the silences history leaves behind.”
Fox Creek follows a cast of unforgettable characters—enslaved and enslaver alike—whose intertwined fates reveal the staggering contradictions of life in the 19th-century South. Torrey, who has spent decades researching plantation records, slave narratives, and diaries of both the oppressed and the oppressors, renders a narrative that is at once harrowing, compassionate, and morally urgent. By portraying slave owners not as caricatures but as ordinary people who justified extraordinary harm, she forces readers to ask: How do ordinary people blind themselves to cruelty?
Reviewers have drawn comparisons to Beloved for the novel’s emotional weight. Chicago Book Review wrote: “Torrey gives voice to the silenced, and she does it with compassion, skill, and a clear sense of moral responsibility.” Foreword Clarion Reviews praised the book as “riveting … a rich historical novel,” while San Diego Book Review called it “essential reading” for those who want fiction that confronts America’s past “with clear eyes and open wounds.”
For Torrey, the novel was thirty years in the making. A chance trip to Louisiana decades ago, followed by visits to plantations and countless hours of archival study, shifted her trajectory as a writer. What began as a ghost story set in New Orleans transformed into an epic novel about slavery, race, and the stories America tells—and refuses to tell—about itself.
Alongside her writing, Torrey has lived a life of service and global perspective. She holds a master’s in religion with a focus on eco-justice, co-founded Orphans Africa, which builds schools for orphaned children in Tanzania, and has written more than a dozen books for young readers. With Fox Creek, she turns her storytelling gifts toward adult audiences, offering a narrative as morally challenging as it is emotionally resonant.
“Stories are blueprints for memory,” Torrey says. “When we erase, we forget. When we forget, we excuse. And when we excuse, we perpetuate the very injustices we claim to abhor.”
Fox Creek is not a story of nostalgia, but of reckoning—a call for readers to face the past with honesty and courage.
About the Author
M. E. Torrey is the award-winning author of 12 children’s books and the co-founder of Orphans Africa. She holds a master’s in religion with a focus on eco-justice and now makes her adult-fiction debut with Fox Creek. She lives in South Puget Sound, Washington.
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Website: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/231138248-fox-creek