A woman tells of her long, rich life and the terrible impact upon her of slavery.
Freed from slavery, an indomitable woman narrates her century of life.
This sweeping novel begins with its narrator, Momma Grace, living in Ohio with her family five years after the end of the Civil War. She’s a formerly enslaved woman, at least a century old, and she has a remarkable story to tell. She begins at the beginning, with her golden childhood in West Africa, an idyll cut short when slave traders kidnap the girl called Little Bird and one of her older sisters. Williams skillfully gives the reader a child’s-eye view of the confusion and cruelty of being marched for days to be loaded onto a ship for the Middle Passage. But Little Bird’s life soon takes another surprising turn, one that will be largely good luck for her. The ship is raided by a pirate crew led by a formerly enslaved captain called Caesar, and he quickly notices Little Bird’s facility for languages. Renamed Maryam, she becomes his translator and spy, and also, on a remote island where his crew's families live, she becomes apprentice to a midwife and healer. That luck doesn’t hold; after a few years she ends up in the slave markets and begins a long life of bondage. The skills she learned on Caesar’s island make her particularly valuable—when she’s sent to deliver babies, White and Black, and to treat the sick, it’s the slave master who collects the pay for her services. As she is sold from one plantation to another, she forms warm friendships and romances, even marrying once (although it’s illegal for the enslaved to marry). She has several children and, one way or another, loses most of them—some of them sold away by her enslavers, who see their slaves’ children as commodities. Momma Grace’s story is often a brutal one, but it’s full of adventure and romance, courage and resilience. It’s no apologia for slavery but a moving portrait of its fully human victims.
A woman tells of her long, rich life and the terrible impact upon her of slavery.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-309707-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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