Tag Archives: slavery

The American Daughters by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

03 Tuesday Sep 2024

Posted by in Fiction, Historical Fiction, United States

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“I knew from page one that this wasn’t going to be a typical journey through a familiar history. Wonderfully structured with a genius conceit, Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s The American Daughters is a thoughtful, courageous, exciting invitation to look beneath the surface—to uncover, peel back, find, and examine the hidden, lost, and missing fragments of the record, the recovery of which will lead us to discover the spirit of resistance embodied by our ancestors and awaken it in ourselves. . . . A splendid work.”—Robert Jones, Jr., New York Times bestselling author of the National Book Award finalist The Prophets

“Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s third book is a tour de force. An intelligent and haunting novel that grapples with the legacies of American slavery, The American Daughters features a sparkling cast of engaging Black women that you won’t soon forget.”—Lauren Wilkinson, author of American Spy

 “Ruffin’s dignified prose and focus on the bonds of women of color help elevate the novel from the tropes of slavery narratives, and he paints a vibrant picture of antebellum New Orleans. Readers won’t be able to resist this stirring story of freedom by any means necessary.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A high adventure, a revealing history, and a chronicle of one woman’s self-realization. Ruffin also displays some of the cunning imagination and caustic wit he showed in his previous work by interspersing his narrative with imagined transcripts from the past, present, and even the future. Black women as agents—literally—of their own liberation. Who wouldn’t be inspired?”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

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The Blueprint by Rae Giana Rashad   

16 Tuesday Apr 2024

Posted by in dystopian fiction, Fiction

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This futuristic, dystopian novel is reminiscent of the Handmaid’s Tale describing a world where the lives of black women are determined by a computer algorithm.

“The Blueprint is an astounding work, an unflinching portrait of misogyny and racism in a speculative world terrifyingly close to our own. Rae Giana Rashad chronicles the generational ghosts of womanhood, and how we understand ourselves through the stories of those we come from, in a way I’ve never read before. A remarkable new talent, and a timeless literary voice.” — Ashley Audrain, New York Times bestselling author of The Push

“Masterful . . . . Filled with themes such as regret, rebellion, tyranny, and courage, The Blueprint is a compelling read.” — Christian Science Monitor

“Rashad’s fantastic debut evokes familiar history, such as Sally Hemings’ forced relationship with Thomas Jefferson, yet is also wholly new, weaving together vividly imagined characters in Solenne and Henriette and deftly moving through multiple time periods while capturing Solenne’s haunted yet strong voice . . . . Horrifying, captivating, and full of urgency.” — Kirkus Reviews

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Stolen : Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home by Richard Bell

01 Wednesday Feb 2023

Posted by in Biography, History, Non-fiction, Uncategorized, United States

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“A well-told story… A deep dive into the extraordinary risks faced by free blacks in the antebellum era.”–Kirkus Reviews

“Opening an unknown world from an unsung tragedy that started in early national Philadelphia and stretched grimly South, Stolen offers a worm’s eye view of the leviathan of American slavery, and of some of its most dastardly perpetrators and its most remarkable survivors. Richard Bell has researched inventively and mastered a vast body of scholarship, as we would expect from so distinguished a historian. But he also imbues his tale with the deep humanity of a great novelist. Both riveting and heartrending, Stolen joins the great literature of America’s founding tragedy, earning a place alongside the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edward P. Jones, and Toni Morrison.” – Jane Kamensky, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, Harvard University

“Stolen is historical storytelling at its best. Bell makes brilliant detective work come alive with vivid, powerful writing. The saga of these five boys, kidnapped and smuggled from Philadelphia to Mississippi in the 1820s, captures both the powerful undertow of slavery in the free black communities of the North and the urgent dawning of the abolitionist movement. There’s been nothing like it since Northup.” –Adam Rothman, author of Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery

“Rigorously researched, heartfelt, and dramatically concise, Bell’s investigation illuminates the role slavery played in the systemic inequalities that still confront Black Americans” (Booklist)

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Horse: a Novel by Geraldine Brooks

26 Friday Aug 2022

Posted by in Fiction, Historical Fiction, United States

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A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history (publisher)

“Brooks’ chronological and cross-disciplinary leaps are thrilling . . . [Horse] is really a book about the power and pain of words . . . Lexington is ennobled by art and science, and roars back from obscurity to achieve the high status of metaphor.”—The New York Times Book Review

“[Brooks] demonstrates imaginative empathy […] and provides some sardonic correctives to White cluelessness . . . Brooks skillfully […] demonstrate[s] how the poison of racism lingers. Contemporary parallels are unmistakable . . . Strong storytelling in service of a stinging moral message.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) 

“Brooks probes our understanding of history to reveal the power structures that create both the facts and the fiction . . . [She] has penned a clever and richly detailed novel about how we commodify, commemorate, and quantify winning in the United States, all through the lens of horse racing.”
—Library Journal (starred review)

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Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts by Elise Lemire

25 Monday Apr 2022

Posted by in Non-fiction, United States

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Since we live next door to Lincoln, Massachusetts let author Lemire forever change your thoughts about the green space of Walden Pond.  In the 1700’s there was a community of enslaved individuals newly exposed to “freedom” whose stories need to be lifted up and shared.

Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, is most famous as the place where Henry David Thoreau went to ‘live deliberately’ and subsist on the land. Lemire . . . sets about to resurrect the memory of not only the freedmen and -women who dwelled there but also the history of slavery in Concord. . . . Ultimately, Lemire conveys the idea that before Walden Pond was a ‘green space, ‘ it was, in fact, a ‘black space.’–Library Journal

Lemire has genuinely enriched our understanding not only of the history of Concord but also of the country for which that fabled town still so often stands.–New England Quarterly

Thanks to Lemire’s ingenious research, such valiant figures as Brister Freeman and Cato Ingraham can claim their just place alongside the more famous Minutemen in the town that fired the ‘shot heard ’round the world.’–Robert Gross, author of The Minutemen and Their World

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Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

18 Tuesday Aug 2020

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“I might have been ten, eleven years old – I cannot say for certain – when my first master died.”  So begins the odyssey of a young boy who escapes slavery in Barbados and embarks on a richly imbued adventure to discover the true meaning of freedom. Washington Black is an unforgettable character and I looked forward to every sitting with this book.

“Exuberant and spellbinding. . . . The novel is not only harrowing and poignant in its portrayal of the horrors of slavery on a Caribbean plantation but liberating, too, in its playful shattering of the usual tropes. The result is a book about freedom that’s both heartbreaking and joyfully invigorating.” —Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Wall Street Journal

“Edugyan has created a wonder of an adventure story, powered by the helium of fantasy, but also by the tender sensibility of its aspiring young hero.” —NPR

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The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

02 Monday Dec 2019

Posted by in fantasy, Fiction, Historical Fiction, History, United States

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Number one New York Times best seller

Oprah’s Book Club Pick

From the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom.

“The most surprising thing about The Water Dancer may be its unambiguous narrative ambition. This isn’t a typical first novel. . . . The Water Dancer is a jeroboam of a book, a crowd-pleasing exercise in breakneck and often occult storytelling that tonally resembles the work of Stephen King as much as it does the work of Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and the touchstone African-American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler. . . . It is flecked with forms of wonder-working that push at the boundaries of what we still seem to be calling magical realism.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“An experience in taking [Toni] Morrison’s ‘chances for liberation’ literally: What if memory had the power to transport enslaved people to freedom?’ . . . The most moving part of The Water Dancer [is] the possibility it offers of an alternate history. . . The book’s most poignant and painful gift is the temporary fantasy that all the people who leaped off slave ships and into the Atlantic were not drowning themselves in terror and anguish, but going home.”—NPR

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Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill

15 Tuesday Jul 2014

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Many of us have been exposed to slave narratives from the Civil War era.  How about this one set during Revolutionary days?  Aminata Diallo is 6 years old when the traders take her from somewhere in Sierra Leone to the south in America. Eventually she finds her way to New York, is befriended and befriends the British. After the War of Independence, she is sent by the British to New Zealand and finally to the UK where she speaks for the Abolitionists.  All my instincts wanted to shout to her not to return to her Africa – her life time dream.   Not to be missed, this author gorgeously celebrates the resilience of one profound human being in the midst of a tumultuous and terribly unkind time in history.

“I found myself surprised on occasion to catch sight of Mr. Hill’s name on the cover…. He had me believing that this tale came not from the imagination and research of a 21st-century male author, but from the experience of an 18th-century African woman.” (Kim Lundstrom – Real Change)

“An inspirational novel of imaginative excellence and captivating power…. Every step of the way, Lawrence Hill offers readers a vivid portrayal of the emotional landscape that brings Aminata’s tale to life. I highly recommend reading this poignant book.” (Charles Shea LeMone – Roanoke Times)

“Astonishing in scope, humanity and beauty, this is one of those very rare novels in which the deep joy of reading transcends its time and place. Like ?To Kill a Mockingbird?, ?Someone Knows My Name? lets readers experience a life, one footstep at a time, beside an unforgettable protagonist.” (Eileen Charbonneau – Historical Novels Review)

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