A LONG WAY FROM HOME

In a disappointing third novel, the bestselling author of Big Girls Don—t Cry (1996), etc., draws on her family’s history in a story about slavery, miscegenation, and the Civil War. The aim is worthy, but Briscoe never follows through on events or fully explores her characters, who remain curiously sealed off from one another and the times they live in. The story begins in the last years of James Madison’s life, out of office and living at Montpelier, where house-slave Susan works as a housekeeper, aided by ten-year old daughter Clara. As she grows up, Clara describes her increasing anger with whites and her hatred of slavery. Following Madison’s death, Dolley Madison’s wastrel son Todd, deeply in debt, sells many of the slaves as well as Montpelier. Clara stays on under the succession of white masters, one of whom fathers her two daughters, Ellen and Susan (the author’s great-great grandmother) who are fair enough to pass as white. Curiously, Clara never explains the circumstances or names the man. When yet another master takes over, daughter Susan is sold to a Mr. Willard, a rich banker in Richmond whom Susan recognizes as the white man who gave her pennies when she was a child. She also looks like his daughters, Lizbeth and Ellen, but nothing is said or thought about this curious circumstance. As Susan becomes part of the household, looking after Lizbeth’s children and falling in love with freed slave Oliver Armistead, the Civil War begins. Susan and Oliver marry, but he’s taken away to man the defenses of Richmond and she must live with the Willard family, which continues to be self-absorbed and terminally stupid. Even when the War ends, they don’t seem to grasp its implications, but Susan, realizing now that she’s free, is reunited with Oliver and heads to the Tidewater to make a new home and life. Heartfelt, but a thin and unsatisfying take on a weighty and still urgent subject. (First printing of 150,000, $350,000 ad/promo, author tour)