The Missy Box

The Missy Box



In 1685 two ten-year-old girls cross the Atlantic, one in the hold of a slave ship, and the other at the Captain's table of a royal Danish ship. On St. Thomas their lives will become intertwined, along with that of Mette, the brothel keeper, and Isaac and Pundi, two other wanderers who have landed in this fomenting place at the dawn of its plantation history.



Eighty-five years later, in Copenhagen, this family story is uncovered by Maria Suhm, the way many are, through treasures kept hidden. The Missy Box gives up its secrets with tantalizing reluctance, against a backdrop in 1772 of historical scandal and conspiracy that will bring Denmark to a crisis.



The Missy Box is an imagined story based on the young life of Maria Suhm Wheelock, the wife of the second President of Dartmouth College and her great grandmother, Maria Bourdoux Lasalle, a Huguenot refugee from France.



Set in a time before the interior of America had been discovered by Europeans, the Missy Box recreates a world connected by oceans, peopled by refugees, and the kings who controlled their fates.