In Louisiana in1960, thirteen-year old Sophie is feeling
displaced. Her parents have
recently split up, and her mother is learning to be an accountant and selling
their nice house in the suburbs to move herself and Sophie to an apartment in
New Orleans. She sends Sophie off
for the summer to her aunt’s house, an old plantation home in southern
Louisiana, where Sophie spend boring days listening to her grandmother’s
stories of the old days, wandering around the grounds, and exploring the old
maze in the garden.
Sophie longs for adventure of the sort she reads about in
books by C.S. Lewis and E. Nesbit, but when she makes a wish and gets whisked
back in time to 1860, she gets more than she bargained for. With her unruly curly hair, tan, and
dirty, bare feet, she is mistaken for a slave on her family’s working sugar
plantation. The matriarch
(Sophie’s great, great-grandmother) can see the family resemblance in her nose,
so she assumes Sophie is the product of the union between a family member down
the river at another plantation and a slave. From there, the story follows Sophie as she enters the world
of slavery in pre-Civil War Louisiana.
Sherman tells a mesmerizing story here, with ample
historical details. The minutiae
of the slaves’ lives presented here is a fascinating side of history that is
rarely presented. And Sherman
doesn’t shrink from the darker side of the story; there is a scene where a
slave is beaten and plenty of intimations of rape (and the results of it). She handles it all with care, though,
weaving together an amazing story, following both Sophie growing up, as well as
the political movements of the time toward the start of the Civil War (or the
War of Northern Aggression, as Sophie’s grandmother still calls it!).
I loved this book, and the audio production was
excellent. The longer I listened,
the more I wanted to hear. I could
hardly stand to get out of the car after 3 hours because I wanted to hear how
it ended! This unique novel will
captivate fans of both historical fiction and time travel novels.
Random House Audio
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