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Overview
Overview
From the celebrated author of The Secret Life of Bees, a #1 New York Times bestselling novel about two unforgettable American women.
Writing at the height of her narrative and imaginative gifts, Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world.
Hetty "Handful" Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke's daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women.
Kidd's sweeping novel is set in motion on Sarah's eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid. We follow their remarkable journeys over the next thirty five years, as both strive for a life of their own, dramatically shaping each other's destinies and forming a complex relationship marked by guilt, defiance, estrangement and the uneasy ways of love.
As the stories build to a riveting climax, Handful will endure loss and sorrow, finding courage and a sense of self in the process. Sarah will experience crushed hopes, betrayal, unrequited love, and ostracism before leaving Charleston to find her place alongside her fearless younger sister, Angelina, as one of the early pioneers in the abolition and women's rights movements.
Inspired by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke, Kidd goes beyond the record to flesh out the rich interior lives of all of her characters, both real and invented, including Handful's cunning mother, Charlotte, who courts danger in her search for something better.
This exquisitely written novel is a triumph of storytelling that looks with unswerving eyes at a devastating wound in American history, through women whose struggles for liberation, empowerment, and expression will leave no reader unmoved.
- Format: TradePaperback
- Author: Kidd, Sue Monk
- ISBN: 9780143121701
- Condition: Used
- Dimensions: 7.70 x 0.80
- Number Of Pages: 400
- Publication Year: 2015
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Excellent Historical Fiction
Lee C. - 5 years 9 months agoThe author of "The Secret Life of Bees" has written an excellent historical novel told through the eyes of two Charleston, South Carolina women in the early 1800s - one white and one black. Loosely based on the life of Sarah Grimke, an abolitionist, and proponent of women's rights. At the age of 11, she was presented with Hetty, a slave of about the same age and the book follows their lives together and separately over the next 30 years. One of the things that I really liked about it was that Sarah is not a likable character at the beginning of the book, but over the years becomes more sympathetic, even if not ever becoming totally likable. This is a moving, beautifully written book that takes us deep into the lives of these two women and their feelings about each other and the world that surrounds them.
HPB Staff Review