2013 book 19

Tara Conklin's The House Girl
This book has a really interesting premise--a super-ambitious young lawyer working on a case about slavery reparations is trying to track down information about a slave who may have painted some well-known works of art, and that is interspersed with the story of the slave planning an escape in 1852. But there are a few problems here (or I should say, things that weren't really to my taste, as this veered too much into women's fiction for me): lawyer Lina and her plotlines are like super annoying and straight out of some bad 80s fiction for the first half, plus her backstory is unnecessarily complicated. Slave Josephine's story is stronger, but requires a LOT of suspension of disbelief (especially after reading Kindred so recently, which has a whole lot of info about why slaves weren't taught to read). I actually had to take a break from this book halfway through because I didn't really like it. But I picked it back up, and luckily things pick up a bit in the second half, mainly thorough some first-person letters that move the plot along and are frankly more interesting than most of what came before. Then things resolve way too easily, there's a shoehorned-in romance, and the end is completely ridiculous. Basically I didn't really like anything with Lina; it felt like another cliched "young lawyer in the city" kind of thing. But the historical stuff, especially the first-person sections, is pretty strong. I don't know, B/B-?


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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in February.