Happy Holidays, readers! With hustle and bustle of the season, I missed my third Tuesday of the month publishing day, sorry! Knowing you’re busy, I’ll give you two quick reviews to get you on your merry way. Here goes!
The Kitchen House: A Novel
By Kathleen Grissom
384 pages, Published February, 2010
★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
I told you all about The Kitchen House months back. I finally got around to finishing it and it was excellent. The novel tells the story of two women through each of their alternating first person narratives. The first is Lavinia, an Irish indentured servant brought to a plantation in Virginia as a small girl in the late 1700s. She grows up alongside Belle, a slave working in the kitchen house of the plantation. Belle provides the second narration of the novel. The slaves embrace Lavinia as one of their own, and after a bumpy start at the plantation, Lavinia grows to love her newfound family and her role at Tall Oaks. As Lavinia grows older, she’s given the opportunity to move to Williamsburg to live with family of the family she’s working in servitude for. There, she is educated and is taught that because of the color of her skin, her position in life needs to be different than the one she’s always known. She’s taught what it means to be a white woman in that era. Her position in society changes, yet she longs for the family she had in the kitchen house.
What I loved most about this novel is how it realistically portrayed the complicated and intricately hypocritical relationships between black and white people during slavery in America. While slave owners forced their slaves to work for them under insufferable conditions, inflicting unthinkable pain and suffering to force other human beings into submission because of the idiotic belief that they were superior because of their skin color, there were also familial relationships between the disparate groups. In these familial relationships, you might see a slave raising a white baby and that white baby loving its nanny even more than it loves its own mother, proving that you have to teach a human being to be racist. They certainly aren’t born racist. You might see the white mistress of the house taking her maid as a confidante and friend. On the flip side, you’d see a white man of the house, often taking a black woman sexually by force, then see that same man give the woman a token of love, such as a piece of jewelry. However, when that woman then gave birth to a child whose father is clearly white, said white man would refuse to accept the child as his own. These types of relationships described through Lavinia’s and Belle’s different perspectives made it so I didn’t want to put the book down.
While reading this book, I found myself wondering the background of the author. It turns out that she is a white Canadian woman, who became interested in writing about this topic when she and her husband were restoring a plantation. She did a great deal of research on plantations in the Virginia area, as well as read a number of slave narratives and conducted interviews with living relatives of slaves from the area. Her intense research of history shows through in the novel, which I further appreciated. Aside from being seemingly historically accurate, I recommend you read this book if you enjoy complicated relationships. It’s a page-turner that’s full of them. I highly recommend this one.
The Red Tent
By Anita Diamant
352 pages, originally published in 1997
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
The Red Tent is Anita Diamant’s take on further diving into the story of Dinah from the Book of Genesis. Dinah is the only daughter of Jacob (who we learn a great deal about in the Bible), whose story is really never fleshed out. We know of her mothers and brothers, but not much about her. In The Red Tent, Dinah’s story unfolds across several decades, beginning with the story of how Jacob came to marry her mothers, how Dinah was born to Leah, and grew up as the milk sister of Joseph. It is a tale of great loss and sadness, though it has moments of happiness.
When my book club selected this title as our book of the month, I was opposed to the selection. Two girls in our group both have read it before and said they loved it. The synopsis of the book was basically that four women are married to the same man, give birth to a slew of babies, and raise them communally, and they teach their one daughter the ways of women. I’m really not into all that woman power (which I wrongly perceived the book to be about) thing, so I never voted to read the book. Well, that synopsis didn’t really do a very good job of describing what the book was actually about. I ended up not liking it for a completely different reason, which I’ll tell you about now. The first 20% of the book is basically dedicated to Jacob’s wives sleeping with him, getting pregnant, and giving birth. Okay, I get that a crucial part of the story is setting up the reader with the background of Dinah’s family. I get it. But seriously? A whole fifth of the book about knocking up a group of wives? I didn’t find that interesting. Once we got through that section, the story definitely got better. In my opinion, that’s where the book should have started. I could have done without the rest. But the fact that the beginning of the book was there made my reading experience not so enjoyable.
After discussing the book with the ladies of my book club, I learned that book is quite interesting if you’re a student of the Bible. The events the book depicts are in line with the Bible, but go deeper into areas that the Bible doesn’t address. I certainly can accept that, so if you’re into the Bible, you should probably read this book. If you aren’t, then I can think of many other books I’d recommend over this one.
What I’m Reading Now
The Book Club Selection
Flight Behavior
By Barbara Kingsolver
If you comb through the internet for a synopsis of this book, you’re not going to find anything going into great detail. In a nutshell, the book is about Dellarobia, a married woman living in rural Appalachia on a farm, who carries on a flirtation with a younger man. She stumbles upon a lake of fire when she is sneaking off for a tryst with her paramour. Apparently, this fire is caused somehow by global warming, but I haven’t gotten that far in the book yet. I don’t like it so far. I find Kingsolver’s writing difficult to follow. And you know how I feel about long books. This one’s 610 pages. In the busy holiday season, I don’t know if I’m going to finish it, especially because I don’t like it through the first 7%. I’ll let you know how it goes next month.
