Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

This is the story of four slave women who meet every summer at Tawawa House in Ohio.  What makes this historical fiction unique is the setting – at Tawawa House white masters bring their favorite female slaves and live with them in the cottages on the property.  While it is a vacation of sorts for these women, they are never able to forget their standing in society.  The four unique slave/owner relationships give interesting and varied perspectives on how life was for the women in these unusual situations – favored, but still property.

There were two things I would change.  First, I would have liked the book to be longer.  Lately I’ve found that books need a good editor and could benefit from losing 100 or so pages.  This was an exception.  There were a lot of gaps I would have liked to have filled and instances where there could have been more description (and instances where there could have been a lot less).  Second, I wasn’t thrilled with the audiobook.  I got lost in the narrative early on because the voices weren’t consistent which made the listening experience quite confusing.  I switched over to the print version over halfway through and then sailed through the book.  It was an interesting story telling a part of our history I didn’t know.

This author has great potential, and for a first book it was quite good, just a little overly ambitious.  I would probably read her next book.