Juan Mendez Scott

Based on a true story, Judah is a psychologically charged historical novel set in Oxon Hill, Maryland, in 1834. Narrated by a fourteen-year-old enslaved girl, the novel traces Judah's growing awareness of power, surveillance, and silence within the plantation system, and the moment she realizes that freedom will not come without bloodshed. As legal pressure, shifting authority, and quiet betrayals close in, Judah learns how to survive by observing, withholding, and choosing precisely when to act.
Unsentimental and morally unflinching, Judah explores what happens when an enslaved child decides that freedom is worth committing murder for, and what history chooses to remember afterward.