Chew and Digest Book Reviews

 

Books completed last week:

• Impatient with Desire by Gabrielle Burton (fiction based on the Donner Party)
• Suddenly Frugal: How to Live Happier & Healthier for Less by Leah Ingram
• Brigid of Kildare by Heather Terrell

 

Books on the shelf for this week:

• The Templars by Piers Paul Read (This one is on the back burner until I get my required reviews done)
• This Book is Overdue by Marilyn Johnson
• The American Revolution: A Grand Mistake by Leland G. Stauber  (This has been started and is scary enlightening. Perhaps the Revolution was a bad idea)
• The Devil’s Star by Jo Nesbo
• The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle

Books I Still Need to Write Reviews On:

• Water- This will be a challenge to write. I can’t remember when I have been so lack luster about a book. There was nothing specific to hate, it was just a chore.
• Brigid of Kildare
• Impatient with Desire

My Good News:

My first review for the San Francisco Book Review has been published and the others are on their website. I can’t tell you the feelings that I had when I saw the galleys with my name on a review in print. I felt like Clark Kent, okay not that cool, but close.

Kisses and happy reading,

 

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Four slave women’s lives are changed forever by meeting once a year while taken on vacations to Ohio as their master’s mistresses. While they may enjoy more privilege than most slaves, the desire for freedom is never far from their minds once they learn that there is another option.

Lizzie, Reenie, Sweet and Mawu share their different experiences with being a slave/mistress at the same time meeting meet abolitionists and free blacks. This enlivens a stronger thirst for escape in Reenie and Mamu than the other women and their desire will lead to a fiery destruction.

Lizzie loves her master and the children she has had with them. Sweet couldn’t bear to leave her 5 babies behind. Is Lizzie’s love real? What happens when we lose everything and are the only one left behind? What price would you be willing to pay for freedom?

I honestly couldn’t put Wench down. I read it in less than one day because the suspense that Perkins-Valdez builds while pulling you into her characters was intense. Obviously, I know nothing of slavery, yet I could almost feel myself looking over these women’s shoulders. They were all well developed and I could understand all of their reasons for being with their masters, loving them, and their mixed desire for escape.

Even now, we women make compromises in life to get what we want. That was what, for me, made Wench so tangible. It was a learning experience, an escape, and a great read.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez's fiction and essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, African American Review, North Carolina Literary Review, and the Richard Wright Newsletter. Born and raised in Memphis, a graduate of Harvard, and a former University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow, Perkins-Valdez teaches creative writing at the University of Puget Sound. She splits her time between Washington, D.C. and Seattle, Washington. This is her first novel.

• Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Amistad (January 5, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006170654X
• ISBN-13: 978-0061706547