![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Book Review
Aug. 29th, 2023 08:40 pmRiver Sing Me Home
by Eleanor Shearer
This very good novel is set in 1834 in the Caribbean. Britain has just ended slavery, but the plantation owners have decreed that the formerly enslaved people are now apprentices and thus still bound to labor for another six years. Rachel has had enough, so she runs. Once she escapes the plantation, she resolves to find her five children, sold away from her long ago. her quest takes her from Barbados to Antigua and finally to Trinidad. Her travels bring her to revelations and reunions that range from tragic to joyful.
River Sing Me Home is beautifully written. Shearer describes both the natural world and her characters' emotions with subtlety and depth, giving the reader exactly as much as is needed to feel and understand. Rachel is a woman who had suppressed her feelings and her personality under the grind of slavery and freedom allows her to peel that away and let herself out at last. Her love for her children never died, it was just dormant, and watching it unfold is lovely. The ability to feel and to be with family is the essence of freedom for Rachel.
by Eleanor Shearer
This very good novel is set in 1834 in the Caribbean. Britain has just ended slavery, but the plantation owners have decreed that the formerly enslaved people are now apprentices and thus still bound to labor for another six years. Rachel has had enough, so she runs. Once she escapes the plantation, she resolves to find her five children, sold away from her long ago. her quest takes her from Barbados to Antigua and finally to Trinidad. Her travels bring her to revelations and reunions that range from tragic to joyful.
River Sing Me Home is beautifully written. Shearer describes both the natural world and her characters' emotions with subtlety and depth, giving the reader exactly as much as is needed to feel and understand. Rachel is a woman who had suppressed her feelings and her personality under the grind of slavery and freedom allows her to peel that away and let herself out at last. Her love for her children never died, it was just dormant, and watching it unfold is lovely. The ability to feel and to be with family is the essence of freedom for Rachel.
