AMERICAN DAUGHTERS

Two young women with independent spirits fight to find their places in the world.

When Portia Washington, daughter of Booker T. Washington, first meets Alice Roosevelt, daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, Portia has just thrown up behind a tree. She is deeply distraught by President Roosevelt’s public snub of her father after he invited them to Washington, D.C. Alice, unfazed by the vomit, takes Portia back to the White House and declares that they will be fast friends. Portia feels similar warmth for Alice but recognizes the giant gulf between their lives. In this work of fictionalized history—there is some evidence that the women were friends—Huguley tells each woman’s story in alternating chapters. Portia is a talented musician with dreams of learning from the masters in Europe while bringing the songs of her community to the stage. Alice is a spitfire with political savvy who has the misfortune of growing up in the Victorian era. Both women struggle with love, domineering men, and dreams cast aside; Portia, of course, deals with all that while being a Black woman in a white man’s world. Despite the women’s very real difficulties, Huguley sometimes mistakes melodrama for substance (“I curse the day I ever married you”). Her treatment of time can be confusing, as she gives us a few years from one character’s perspective and then jumps back in time for the other. The novel is at its best when the disconnect between the women is at the forefront—for example, what for Alice is a simple meetup of friends at her home for Portia means being forced to use the servants’ door. And while Portia’s chapters are absorbing from the start, it takes a while for Alice to bring much to the table.

An intriguing glimpse into the lives of two historical women.