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
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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
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BOOK REVIEW
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