"The Kitchen House" by Kathleen Grissom

Synopsis:  Seven-year-old Lavinia is orphaned while aboard a ship from Ireland.  Upon her arrival in the states, Lavinia is taken to live and work with the slaves on a tobacco plantation.  Despite her white skin, Lavinia becomes close with her surrogate slave family.  The story follows young Lavinia into adulthood, where she finds herself struggling to define her place in white society while maintaining ties to her beloved black family.

Review:  This book had promise (I couldn't put it down until I got halfway through), but it got so bogged down in its own melodrama, that it started to feel more like a soap opera.  Lavinia is the narrator for the better part of the book, but she is childish and naive to a fault and is cause of much of the heartache that this book is centered around (and, trust me, there is a lot of heartache here).  The characters that we are meant to love, namely those living and working in the kitchen house, are fleshed out nicely and readers will easily come to care for them.  However, the antagonists in the story are very flat characters.  They are solely bad people with bad thoughts whom  I could not relate to.  I've heard this book referred to as "realistic" and while I don't doubt that these awful things happened during slavery, I felt like this story was a compilation of the worst of the worst.

Spoilers:  This book was a rough one for me.  I like my literature to be a little more escapist and I tend to try to avoid books with themes on rape, incest, physical and emotional abuse, etc.  I felt bad for Lavinia at first, but quickly grew tired of her naivete.  There were too many instances in this book where one character could have prevented a horrible outcome for another.  I wished so dearly that Belle had made it clear to Lavinia why Will was coming to visit so that Lavinia never would have married Marshall.  I was disappointed that the book started with a grisly hanging and while I was glad that it wasn't Belle was was hanged, it was almost worse to find out it was Mama Mae.  What a heartbreaking book.