The House Girl

The House Girl by Tara Conklin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Conklin takes some familiar tropes and breathes new life into them. There are two narratives--one of Josephine, a house slave in a dying tobacco plantation, and Lina, a lawyer researching for a reparations case. We've seen this double narrative before, but Conklin makes both sides equally interesting and readable. Then Conklin switches tactics half-way through and gives us new voices in a series of letters. I didn't enjoy this interruption at first, but the whole story becomes a sort of puzzle with different pieces overlapping until you get most of the picture. The story doesn't answer every question (which makes it that much more realistic) but it gives some fresh perspectives on what freedom means and a different aspect of the atrocities of slavery.

View all my reviews