Status
Publication
Description
"For a runaway slave in the 1840s south, life on the run can be just as dangerous as life under a sadistic Massa. That's what fifteen-year-old Naomi learns after she escapes the brutal confines of life on an Alabama plantation. Striking out on her own, she must leave behind her beloved Momma and sister Hazel and take refuge in a Georgia brothel run by a freewheeling, gun-toting Jewish madam named Cynthia. There, amidst a revolving door of gamblers, prostitutes, and drunks, Naomi falls into a star-crossed love affair with a smooth-talking white man named Jeremy who frequents the brothel's dice tables too often. The product of Naomi and Jeremy's union is Josey, whose white skin and blonde hair mark her as different from the other slave children on the plantation. Having been taken in as an infant by a free slave named Charles, Josey has never known her mother, who was murdered at her birth. Josey soon becomes caught in the tide of history when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reaches the declining estate and a day of supposed freedom quickly turns into a day of unfathomable violence that will define Josey--and her lost mother--for years to come."--Publisher's website.… (more)
User reviews
This was an interesting novel that didn't lack for drama, but had a lot more melodrama than I would have liked. While Naomi was flawed, but willing to act, her daughter spent her life needing to be cared for and her decisions made for her, first by her guardian and then by her husband, making her a not very interesting character to spend half of a novel reading about. I also have some questions about some of the behaviors of a few of the characters and of whether that would have been at all likely in the antebellum south, but the two stories didn't lack for momentum.