Elias Canetti wrote that in the rare occasions when people are able to free themselves from the chains that bind them, they are then immediately subject to new ones. Mary, a fifteen-year-old girl who lives with her family on a farm in rural England in the 1830s, has milk-colored hair and was born with a physical defect in one leg but momentarily escapes her family sentence when she is Sent to work as a maid to care for the wife of the vicar, who is sick. Then you have the opportunity to learn to read and write, to stop seeing "just a bunch of black stripes" in the books. However, as she leaves the world of the shadows, she discovers that the lights can be even more blinding, so Mary has only the power to tell her story to try to find peace in the written word. In The Color of Milk, Nell Leyshon has recreated with tragic beauty an overwhelming microcosm, populated by characters such as Mary's father, who curses life for not giving her sons; The grandfather, who pretends ill to see his beloved Mary once more; Edna, the vicar's maid who keeps three shrouds under the bed, one for her and two for a husband and a son she does not have; All framed by a bucolic environment that flows to the seasons and the work of the farm, which comes alive with a heartbreaking innocence thanks to Mary's commitment to leave a written testimony of the fate acquired, which no longer has the smallest Possibility of resignation.