FOLLY PARK

A Southern woman attempts to preserve her family’s crumbling Virginia plantation estate and confronts its dark history.

In the present day, Temple Preston is the curator of Folly Park, a historic house on an old slave plantation once owned by her ancestor Gen. Thomas Temple Smith. Smith was a famous Confederate general, his name still largely esteemed by some Virginians. Temple, who has a doctorate in Civil War history, hopes to restore the dilapidated mansion and make peace with her Southern heritage, a desire sensitively portrayed by Hackford: “She felt both a duty to her heritage and a desire to atone, somehow, for the stain of slaveholding that was spread like a blight through the branches of the family tree.” Her plan is to convince the government to contribute funds to Folly Park’s restoration in exchange for establishing a group home for at-risk girls, but since some of those girls might be Black, it’s a controversial proposal. Then she learns from Vee Williams—a Black graduate student focusing on the Civil War and working for her as an intern—that Smith’s wife, Carolina, might have given birth to a biracial child, the result of her relationship with an enslaved person. The author builds an increasingly nuanced depiction of Temple’s emotional reckoning with a heritage she wants to preserve but has not fully understood, a personal odyssey that yields revelations. Hackford’s writing is crisp and poignant. It also avoids the didactic inclination to steep the reader in facile lessons about racial justice and harmony. Rather, she artfully conveys a compelling drama and allows the philosophical themes to develop organically. The result is a powerful novel, as affecting as it is provocative.

Thoughtfully reconsiders a chapter of the nation’s fraught racial history.