Friday 56 & #BookBeginnings: The House Girl

For Book Beginnings:
Mister hit Josephine with the palm of his hand across her left cheek and it was then she knew she would run. 

- p. 3

For Friday 56:

"Money won at trial or received through a settlement will go into a trust to fund a variety of programs and institutions," Dan said [..]. A national slavery museum, a monument on the National Mall, college scholarships, educational programs, funds for minority-owned businesses [..]" - p. 56

Synopsis: Virginia, 1852. Seventeen-year-old Josephine Bell decides to run from the failing tobacco farm where she is a slave and nurse to her ailing mistress, the aspiring artist Lu Anne Bell. New York City, 2004. Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in an elite law firm, is given a difficult, highly sensitive assignment that could make her career: she must find the “perfect plaintiff” to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves.

It is through her father, the renowned artist Oscar Sparrow, that Lina discovers Josephine Bell and a controversy roiling the art world: are the iconic paintings long ascribed to Lu Anne Bell really the work of her house slave, Josephine? A descendant of Josephine’s would be the perfect face for the reparations lawsuit—if Lina can find one. While following the runaway girl’s faint trail through old letters and plantation records, Lina finds herself questioning her own family history and the secrets that her father has never revealed: How did Lina’s mother die? And why will he never speak about her?

Moving between antebellum Virginia and modern-day New York, this searing, suspenseful and heartbreaking tale of art and history, love and secrets, explores what it means to repair a wrong and asks whether truth is sometimes more important than justice.

The other week I reviewed The House Girl by Tara Conklin and found the art scandal twist quite interesting: this is about how a young slave girl was found to be the real artist behind the portraits of slaves in southern American. The story of Josephine provides a human face to slavery, and the idea of restitution over a hundred years later makes for some compelling reading.

Is this something you'd pick up?