The Blue Tattoo, Margot Mifflin
List: $16.99 | Sale: $11.89
Club: $8.49

The Blue Tattoo
The Life of Olive Oatman

Author: Margot Mifflin

Narrator: Kaipo Schwab

Unabridged: 6 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/29/2016


Synopsis

In 1851 Olive Oatman was a thirteen-year-old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. Orphaned when her family was brutally killed by Yavapai Indians, Oatman lived as a slave to her captors for a year before being traded to the Mohave, who tattooed her face and raised her as their own. She was fully assimilated and perfectly happy when, at nineteen, she was ransomed back to white society. She became an instant celebrity, but the price of fame was high and the pain of her ruptured childhood lasted a lifetime. Based on historical records, including letters and diaries of Oatman's friends and relatives, The Blue Tattoo is the first book to examine her life, from her childhood in Illinois—including the massacre, her captivity, and her return to white society—to her later years as a wealthy banker's wife in Texas.

Author Bio

Margot Mifflin is an author, journalist, and professor who writes about women's history and the arts. The author of Bodies of Subversion and The Blue Tattoo, she has written for the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Elle, salon.com, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Believer, the New Yorker, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other publications.

Reviews