Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related 'documents' and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. Kidd’s portrait of white slave-owning Southerners is all the more harrowing for showing them as morally complicated, while she gives Handful the dignity of being not simply a victim, but a strong, imperfect woman.Īn amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. Sarah visits less and less often, but the bond between the two women continues until it is tested one last time.

Through her mother, Handful gets to know Denmark Vesey, who dies as a martyr after attempting to organize a slave uprising. As Sarah’s activism gives her new freedom, Handful’s life only becomes harder in the Grimké household. Eventually, she escapes to Philadelphia and becomes a Quaker, until the Quakers prove too conservative. While Handful is physically imprisoned, she maintains her independent spirit, while Sarah has difficulty living her abstract values in her actual life. As Sarah and Handful mature, their lives take separate courses. When they are caught, Handful receives a lashing, while Sarah is banned from her father’s library and all the books therein, her dream of becoming a lawyer dashed. Sarah breaks the law by secretly teaching Handful to read and write. Soon, Sarah and Handful have established a bond built on affection and guilt. Precocious Sarah is horrified at the idea of owning a slave but is given no choice by her mother, a conventional Southern woman of her time who is not evil but accepts slavery (and the dehumanizing cruelties that go along with it) as a God-given right. Called Hetty by the whites, Handful is just what her name implies-sharp tongued and spirited. In 1803, 11-year-old Sarah receives a slave as her birthday present from her wealthy Charleston parents. Kidd re-imagines Sarah’s life in tandem with that of a slave in the Grimké household. Sarah Grimké was an actual early abolitionist and feminist whose upbringing in a slaveholding Southern family made her voice particularly controversial. Kidd ( The Mermaid Chair, 2005, etc.) hits her stride and avoids sentimental revisionism with this historical novel about the relationship between a slave and the daughter of slave owners in antebellum Charleston.

The invention of wings review