Author: Lisa Wingate
Published: April 7th 2020 by Ballantine Books
Format: eBook, 400 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Source: My thanks to Netgalley and the Publisher for an opportunity to read an advanced copy of this book.
Picking up this book to get a little taste resulted in not putting it down, except when I had to, for two days. Not usually being a fan of current day/flashback fragmented narratives, the stories of freed slave Hannie Gossett (1875) and Benny Silva (1987), had me captivated from the beginning.
Benny Silva arrives in rural Augustine, Louisiana to begin teaching at a school where the last thing anyone wants, including the administration, is to spend any time or money teaching the kids who couldn’t make it into the better school down the road. Wanting to learn more about her new home, and the cemetery across the road, Benny enlists a local woman to come to her class and tell the stories of the women that had come before them and created what no one thought they could.
Hannie Gossett, after being freed, remained on Goswood Grove as a sharecropper. All she has left of her family is a necklace with three blue beads and a hope she will one day be able to bring her family together again.
In a wandering tale, highlighted by the “Lost Friends” advertisements, published in Southern newspapers during the post-Civil War years, which helped newly freed slaves search for loved ones, Hannie and two daughters of the family that once owned her, set out to find the missing patriarch of Gosswood Grove. In doing so, they set a narrative in motion that is not fully revealed until Benny and her students start a much-maligned school project which ties the women of 1875 with her students today.
What I took from this book was an arduous struggle to bring family and community together. A tale of hard-fought freedoms and an understanding of how the past is never really the past and how we owe a debt of gratitude to all who have come before us and what they had to endure to tell their never to be forgotten stories.
Benny Silva arrives in rural Augustine, Louisiana to begin teaching at a school where the last thing anyone wants, including the administration, is to spend any time or money teaching the kids who couldn’t make it into the better school down the road. Wanting to learn more about her new home, and the cemetery across the road, Benny enlists a local woman to come to her class and tell the stories of the women that had come before them and created what no one thought they could.
Hannie Gossett, after being freed, remained on Goswood Grove as a sharecropper. All she has left of her family is a necklace with three blue beads and a hope she will one day be able to bring her family together again.
In a wandering tale, highlighted by the “Lost Friends” advertisements, published in Southern newspapers during the post-Civil War years, which helped newly freed slaves search for loved ones, Hannie and two daughters of the family that once owned her, set out to find the missing patriarch of Gosswood Grove. In doing so, they set a narrative in motion that is not fully revealed until Benny and her students start a much-maligned school project which ties the women of 1875 with her students today.
What I took from this book was an arduous struggle to bring family and community together. A tale of hard-fought freedoms and an understanding of how the past is never really the past and how we owe a debt of gratitude to all who have come before us and what they had to endure to tell their never to be forgotten stories.
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