This is a story told in two parts. It switches between the
antebellum south circa 1852 and modern New York. First year associate at a
prestigious law firm, Lina Sparrow, is tasked with finding the perfect client
to be the face of a class action law suit to demand reparations for the
descendants of American slaves.
Josephine Bell is a house slave on a struggling Virginia plantation. They
are tied together by Josephine’s owner, Lu Anne Bell. After Lu Anne Bell’s
death, her paintings and drawings were found and she was held up as a
revolutionary before her time. Now, nearly 150 years later, her art is being
called into question. Some claim it was done by Josephine since no rich, white,
plantation owner could know the life of a slave so intimately. In this
controversy, Lina thinks she may have found her perfect client as long as she
can connect him to Josephine’s bloodline. Her only problem is Josephine
disappeared shortly before her mistress’s death.
This story sounds intriguing. The reparations aspect, a
little family drama in Lina’s story, trying to find Josephine’s descendants,
and the story of Josephine’s life itself should have combined to make a
wonderful enriching story. The keywords there are should have. What we get
instead is a story that pretty much goes nowhere. Lina is wondering about her
mother and the history behind her death while searching for evidence of what
happened to Josephine’s child and just does some of the dumbest stuff. Trying to
seduce her mother’s former lover, a man old enough to be her father; not
bothering to check for newspaper articles; not looking up the death certificate
at department of vital statistics that as a lawyer should have been her second
stop; or avoiding her dad when he spent the whole book trying to tell her the
truth are not the acts of an intelligent, educated person. The law firm didn’t
want the descendant of Josephine as the face of their law suit because he was “too
white.” They needed someone “darker” to make it look good and, three quarters
of the way through the book, the whole case was dropped for the flimsiest of
reasons. Lina keeps doing the research though because she” must” have answers
to the mystery of Josephine. I won’t
spoil any more of the story but the whole of Josephine’s story is unbelievable
in the extreme. It’s not quite as bad Lina’s but it is still pretty awful.
The writer has apparently never heard of normal colors, geography, research. If something is brown, its coffee colored. Blue eyes and/or blonde hair
are described as pale and anything else is “dark.” The shadows were dark, the
wood was dark, the house was dark, and all of the women’s hair and eye colors were
dark except for Josephine’s (which were blue aka unusual) and anyone who was blonde. Every
time Lina thought about her mother, it was the same paragraph about her
fragrance, her laugh, her warm rich tones, almost as if it were copied and pasted every time the mother's name was written. The writer felt the need to print three entire pages of names while Lina was doing research into slave families trying
to find a descendant. Three Pages! and then had the gall to finish the passage with “and
the list went on and on.” There was no need for three pages of names, a dozen names
would have done the job. I am fairly sure the author was trying to make a point about
how ridiculously awful slavery was but we already know and understand how
terrible it was. The author clearly did little to no research about the areas
outside of New York that she was writing about. At one point Lina visits
Richmond, Va. and travels to a town (that in reality) is 3 hours away. In the
book, it’s an easy 45 minute drive, plus she keeps spelling one of the town
names wrong. Yes, it’s pronounced Stanton but it’s spelled Staunton. As a whole,
it took an interesting basis for a story and goes nowhere while being
repetitious in the extreme and getting basic geography wrong. If I ever read this book again, it will be too soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment