Alessandra is reading…

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

At the age of eleven, I owned a slave I couldn’t free.

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd, Sarah Grimke

Sarah Grimke is gifted Hetty “Handful” for her eleventh birthday, a child slave her family has owned in addition to the others they claim to their names. In the nineteenth century in urban Charleston, Sarah and Handful quickly learn about their roles as Master and slave in life, and then go about challenging and changing those roles throughout their lives.

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❗️Spoilers contained below❗️

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This book was slower paced than I expected at the beginning, but that might’ve also been due to being in the throes of wedding planning and choosing vendors. I also didn’t expect the plot to go as it did – reading the synopsis on the back, I thought Sarah was going to free Handful early on in their lives or thought they’d run away together.

Their laughter would ring out abruptly, a sound Mother welcomed. “Our slaves are happy,” she would boast. It never occurred to her their gaiety wasn’t contentment, but survival.

A good read, heartbreaking and interesting, definitely takes some time to get through.

I’d been wandering about in the enchantments of romance, afflicted with the worst female curse on earth, the need to mold myself to expectations.

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I honestly had a problem reviewing this more than the one crap paragraph above, where I only talk about the pace but not about the content of the book. I think a lot of my anxiety reviewing it is coming from things I’ve read in the media concerning race when it comes to writing about slavery in the US and racism and such. And I think my anxiety is that, the impression that I’ve gotten, talking about books with these themes when you’re not black is an issue. Which is insane to me. That’s saying to me that people who don’t look like the people who are affected by the issues being discussed aren’t “allowed” to talk about it, process it, etc. Which only promotes the problem and silences people trying to either discuss or process social issues and history.

But then I also have read and posted about other currently “controversial” topics on here and instagram. Interesting why I’m anxious about diving into this book.

Read on.