Molly McNett is a teacher of Fiction Writing and ESL composition at Northern Illinois University. McNett recently released a new novel, Child of These Tears, which was named as one of the Best Books of 2025 in The New Statesman.
Ahead of McNett’s January 22 reading excerpts from her book at The Rogue Bookshop in Beloit, Wisconsin, she sat down for an in-depth chat on Child of These Tears with WNIJ host Jason Cregier.
(This is a portion of a longer conversation, which has been edited for time and clarity. Listen to the full interview in the link above.)
Jason Cregier: How long did the research and character structure portion of this novel take you?
Molly McNett: I was laboring with the idea for five years and I wrote a short story that was a captivity narrative. That led me to keep thinking about a longer story, which is how I formed the characters for the story.
And the story is based loosely on the life of Eunice Williams, correct?
That’s right. Eunice Williams was a young girl from the colonial Massachusetts Bay Colony in Deerfield. In 1704 she was taken captive by the French and Mohawks, where they took her to Canada to live in a mission. Whereas in this novel, it’s a fictionalized version of this, with a fictionalized location and mission.
Daily life back then was so brutal, how did people continue to press on in the face of hardships?
The big difference was people’s faith, it’s quite beautiful. They took everything as predestined so if something happened to you, it is because God wanted it to happen to you. You had to search in your soul and say, “Why? What does God want from me in this moment?”
Many beliefs were for the greater good then.
It was also true within the Mohawk society that they work as a collective. There was a collective spirit within them.
As a parent of a young child, our ideas of parenting from then and now… much different.
The book can be a parent’s worst nightmare, highlighting a child being taken away by people who feel and believe much differently than you do.
It’s not all grief and sorrow; there are moments of levity too. The way the Mohawk tribe tease the Jesuit priest made me chuckle.
They draw a goose on his bald head when he is sleeping. There were a lot of playful things like that.
Molly, thanks for joining us for this chat.
Thank you.
Molly McNett will read from her novel, Child of These Tears, on Friday, January 22 at The Rogue Bookshop in Beloit, Wisconsin.
