What a great book! The author did a fantastic job of illustrating Sally Miller's case while briefly touching on other landmark slavery cases of the day. The research was very thorough and brought out the human side of the case. There was a great twist at the end of the book you wouldnt expect that leaves you thinking about it even after youve finished reading it. Definately worth a read!

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This book was recommended to me by a friend, thought it questionable because of the content, but read it anyway and glad I did. It is set in New Orleans in the early and mid 1800s and involves the community of German immigrants, their journey to America, and then zeroes in on the life of a slave girl who claims to be the daughter of one of these immigrants who is mislabeled as a black and sold into slavery in near New Orleans, Louisana. The primary emphasis which kept me enthralled was the court case trying to prove her to be white rather than a quadroon lineage having black blood. I learned a great deal about the laws involving the ownership of slaves in the South by reading this informative and interesting novel.

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I'm still trying to decide what I think really happened. Good story.

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It is a spring morning in New Orleans, 1843. In the Spanish Quarter, on a street lined with flophouses and gambling dens, Madame Carl recognizes a face from her past. It is the face of a German girl, Sally Miller, who disappeared twenty-five years earlier. But the young woman is property, the slave of a nearby cabaret owner. She has no memory of a "white" past. Yet her resemblance to her mother is striking, and she bears two telltale birthmarks. In brilliant novelistic detail, award-winning historian John Bailey reconstructs the exotic sights, sounds, and smells of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, as well as the incredible twists and turns of Sally Miller's celebrated and sensational case. Did Miller, as her relatives sought to prove, arrive from Germany under perilous circumstances as an indentured servant or was she, as her master claimed, part African, and a slave for life? A tour de force of investigative history that reads like a suspense novel, The Lost German Slave Girl is a fascinating exploration of slavery and its laws, a brilliant reconstruction of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, and a riveting courtroom drama. It is also an unforgettable portrait of a young woman in pursuit of freedom.

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A very interesting account of the rules and laws governing slaves in Louisiana. It was an extraordinary true story of Sally Miller and her fight for freedom in Old New Orleans.

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very interesting story with a great twist!

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This book was great! I learned a great deal - and it was written in an engrossing style- not at all like a dry history book. Read it in a weekend!

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Interesting look at a bit of US history. Written by an Australian lawyer.

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