Garden Heights · Independent Novel Study

Chains

a novel by Laurie Halse Anderson

New York, 1776. Isabel is thirteen, enslaved, and sold with her little sister to a wealthy loyalist couple just as the harbor fills with warships and the argument over independence hardens into war. When a rebel officer offers her a bargain — carry out what she overhears inside the Lockton house, and freedom may follow — Isabel has to decide whose promises are worth anything to a girl the whole city has trained itself not to see. Laurie Halse Anderson (author) builds the Revolution from the ground up, out of letters, ledgers, and newspapers, and asks what liberty meant to the people it was never written for. These 8 Part workbooks cover the full novel, with vocabulary, comprehension, literary analysis, Think Deeper reasoning, SAT & TOEFL-style practice, and writing, all built on real-world CLIL background.

Level 6Interactive & auto-gradedCLIL-based

Level 6 · Expert ReadersUS Grades 7–8Lexile 780LAR (ATOS) 5.2🏆 National Book Award Finalist 2008🏆 Scott O’Dell Award 2009

📖 Get the right book: our workbooks follow the Atheneum — Simon & Schuster (paperback) edition — ISBN 9781416905868. All recommended editions →

Subject Personalities

The real-world subjects this novel study leans into — the depth behind every Knowledge Bank and reading passage.

PRIMARY LENS

⚖ Slavery in the Northern Colonies

The part of American slavery most textbooks skip — how thousands of enslaved people lived and worked in New York, Rhode Island, and New England, what a will or a bill of sale could do to a family, and how both armies dangled freedom in front of Black colonists while writing them out of the founding documents.

PRIMARY LENS

⚓ Occupied New York and the War’s Civilians

The Revolution as the people who could not leave it experienced it — a fleet in the harbor, the Declaration read aloud in the streets, the great fire of September 1776 and the shanty town that grew from its ashes, prison churches, water carriers, ration lines, and a city changing hands.

SUPPORTING

📜 How Historical Fiction Is Built From Real Documents

The novelist’s workshop — period letters, diaries, newspapers, runaway notices, and account books; the difference between a primary and a secondary source; how a writer decides where the record stops and invention begins, and why an author’s note belongs at the back of a novel like this one.

8-Part Novel Study

Choose a Part

Progress

PT1

Part 1 · Chapters 1–6

A Funeral, a Will, and a Promise That Comes to Nothing • Two Sisters Sold North to a Loyalist House in New York • A Boy on the Wharf With Questions About Whose Side She Is On

VocabularyComprehensionLiterary ElementsThink DeeperStandardized TestWriting

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PT2

Part 2 · Chapters 7–12

A New Kitchen, a New Name, and a Mistress Who Must Be Read Like Weather • What a Girl Nobody Watches Can Hear Through a Floorboard • A Rebel Officer Makes an Offer

VocabularyComprehensionLiterary ElementsThink DeeperStandardized TestWriting