WORTHLESS

Debut author Russell presents a work of time-travel historical fiction novel set in the antebellum South.

The reader first meets 20-something Mercy Maddox (née Birmingham) at the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport in Georgia in 2019. Mercy once lived in a trailer park with her down-and-out family until her father arranged, two years ago, for her to marry Blake Maddox, a wealthy financier with political ambitions. He’s also a racist with ties to the Ku Klux Klan, and he has a burning desire for a male heir. Mercy is in a bad state, and at the airport she purposely gets into a car that was meant for someone else. Perhaps, she thinks, this decision will take her to freedom. However, the driver—who turns out to be a hired killer—attempts to rape and murder Mercy, whom he thinks is someone else; she escapes into a nearby river, from which a stranger rescues her. Soon, however, she finds that the year is 1838, and she’s recovering at the sprawling Butler Plantation in Georgia, owned by enslaver Pierce Butler and his wife, a former stage performer named Fanny Kemble Butler. Mercy, who’s white, assumes the role of Colleen O’Brien, who went missing years before; she’s hired as a governess for the Butler children. The enslavement of Black people at the plantation consumes Mercy’s thoughts; she later falls in love with an enslaved man named Jayda. Later, she’s sent with Pierce and others on an expedition north; it turns out that he’s pursuing a moneymaking scheme that involves sending free men in the north into slavery.

As soon as Mercy’s initial car trip from the airport goes awry, readers will find themselves intrigued by several key questions: Who was the driver actually hired to kill? How was Mercy transported back to the 19th century? And, most importantly, what will Mercy do when confronted with the evils of slavery? All these issues will keep readers turning pages. And along the way, the novel investigates several details of the past that one might not expect. For instance, Mercy finds aspects of women’s clothing of the time to be baffling, right down to underclothes that provide surprisingly little coverage. The text also includes real-life voices of the past, such as Fanny Kemble Butler, an actual actor who wrote a journal. An excerpt from a letter in which Fanny describes her disgust with “a most hideous and detestable species of reptile”—a centipede that fills her “very heart with dismay”—is as humorous as it is illuminating. Many imagined conversations, on the other hand, feel a bit bland, but the strange nature of the protagonist’s situation keeps things interesting throughout; after all, if Mercy was so easily sent back in time, readers will feel that she could be returned to the present at any moment. The excitement comes in seeing how all the story threads will tie together—assuming that Mercy can make it through her mysterious time warp unscathed.

A well-plotted adventure of a modern woman in the pre-Civil War South.