Viking
January 2014
On Sale: January 7, 2014
Featuring: Sarah Grimke; Hetty "Handful" Grimke
384 pages ISBN: 0670024783 EAN: 9780670024780 Kindle: B00H58VGIA Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
Writing at the height of her narrative and imaginative
gifts, Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring,
the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the
world—and it is now the newest Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection.
Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth
century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating
walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household.
The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age
she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is
hemmed in by the limits imposed on women.
Kidd’s sweeping novel is set in motion on Sarah’s eleventh
birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old
Handful, who is to be her handmaid. We follow their
remarkable journeys over the next thirty five years, as both
strive for a life of their own, dramatically shaping each
other’s destinies and forming a complex relationship marked
by guilt, defiance, estrangement and the uneasy ways of love.
As the stories build to a riveting climax, Handful will
endure loss and sorrow, finding courage and a sense of self
in the process. Sarah will experience crushed hopes,
betrayal, unrequited love, and ostracism before leaving
Charleston to find her place alongside her fearless younger
sister, Angelina, as one of the early pioneers in the
abolition and women’s rights movements.
Inspired by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke, Kidd goes
beyond the record to flesh out the rich interior lives of
all of her characters, both real and invented, including
Handful’s cunning mother, Charlotte, who courts danger in
her search for something better.
This exquisitely written novel is a triumph of storytelling
that looks with unswerving eyes at a devastating wound in
American history, through women whose struggles for
liberation, empowerment, and expression will leave no reader
unmoved.
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