Loved itthe accuracy in which the book is follows historical events through this family is just phenomenal and they did it in you know very few pages actually when you think about it
Some Sing, Some Cry (2010)
Others: Positive The story of emancipated slave Elizabeth Mayfield traces her rise as the matriarch of a family of musically gifted Southern women who overcome brutal obstacles while witnessing key moments in American history.
- ISBN:
- 9780312198992
- Length:
- 568 pages
Genres: historical fiction
Lists: …
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J. California Cooper
1991 · 231 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveIn this wise, beguiling, beautiful novel set in the era of the Civil War, an award-winning playwright and author paints a haunting portrait of a woman named Always, born a slave, and four generations of her African-American family. A slave mother, distraught that her children, sired by her master, might be sold away from her, attempts to poison them all.
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Also historical fiction73%Similar descriptions15%Brown Girl Reading loved bothPersonalize your recommendations12%The book of night women
Marlon James
2009 · 432 pages · 3 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveFrom a young writer who radiates charisma and talent comes a sweeping, stylish historical novel of Jamaican slavery that can be compared only to Toni Morrison's Beloved.The Book of Night Women is a sweeping, startling novel—a true tour de force of both voice and storytelling—that tells the story of a young slave woman on a sugar plantation in Jamaica at the turn of the nineteenth century, revealing a world and a culture that is both familiar and entirely new. Lilith is born into slavery, and even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they—and she— will come to both revere and fear. The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been conspiring to stage a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age they see her as the key to and—as she reveals the extent of her power and begins to understand her own desires and feelings—potentially the weak link in their plans.Lilith's story overflows with high drama and heartbreak, and life on the plantation is rife with dangerous secrets, unspoken jealousies, inhuman violence, and very human emotion— between slave and master, between slave and overseer, and among the slaves themselves. Lilith finds herself at the heart of it all. And all of it told in one of the boldest literary voices to recently grace the page—and the secret of that voice is one of the book's most suspenseful, satisfying mysteries.The real revelation of the book—the secret to the stirring imagery and insistent prose—is Marlon James himself, a young writer at once wholly in command of his craft and breathtakingly daring, spinning his magical web of humanity, race, and love, fully inhabiting the incredibly rich nineteenth-century Jamaican patois that rings with a distinctly contemporary energy.
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Also historical fiction75%Similar descriptions13%Brown Girl Reading loved bothPersonalize your recommendations12%The Covenant of Water
Abraham Verghese
2023 · 1 review
Others: PositiveSpanning the years 1900 to 1977, three generations of a Christian family in Kerala, South India, suffer a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning. As the novel opens, a twelve-year-old girl is sent by boat to her wedding, where she meets her husband for the first time. She joins a prosperous household and becomes known as Big Ammachi, the matriarch of an extraordinary family that will endure hardship, celebrate triumph, and witness unthinkable changes over the coming decades.
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Leonard Pitts
2012 · 404 pages · 1 review
Others: Positive""At the end of the Civil War, an escaped slave first returns to his old plantation and then walks across the ravaged South in search of his lost wife"--Provided by the publisher"--
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Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa
2009 · 323 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveA tale spanning five generations of a family of African-Puerto Rican women finds mute seamstress Fela working in colonial Puerto Rico and drawing on her tribal beliefs to enable the birth of a daughter who becomes a powerful curandera.
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Vaddey Ratner
2012 · 368 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveTold from the tender perspective of a young girl who comes of age amid the Cambodian killing fields, this novel is based on the author's personal story. For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. Soon the family's world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as she endures the deaths of family members, starvation, and brutal forced labor, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of childhood, the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival.
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