She was awarded a Thouron Fellowship, enabling her to study at Sussex University in the United Kingdom, where she received an MA in Victorian literature.

[8] The book, "bruisingly honest about class, race and sex in America",[4] found success with the critics and was shortlisted the same year by The New York Times as "summer reading.

En route with her new owner to New York City, for their voyage to South America, she escapes via the Underground Railroad and works to build a new life in Philadelphia.

Fernanda Eberstadt, reviewing the novel in The New York Times, commented that Cary "is a powerful storyteller, frankly sensual, mortally funny, gifted with an ear for the pounce and ragged inconsequentiality of real speech and an eye for the shifts and subterfuges by which ordinary people get by".

[12] Cary's first Young Adult book, FREE!, was a collection of non-fiction accounts related to the Underground Railroad, and published by Third World Press/New City Press in 2005.

[13] Cary said she believes these 12 stories of daring escapes "allow our 21st-century minds to imagine actively the inner lives of enslaved people – and put ourselves in their places, not with shame, but compassion and respect.

As the story begins, Alonzo goes to South Carolina to urge the aging Selma to sell her land, in order to pay for her long-term care.

[16] Says Carleen Brice, author of Orange Mint and Honey and Children of the Waters, "Every single character pops off the page in this amazing story.