![]() Agent: Michelle Brower, Folio Literary Management. Striving for affecting revelations, Conklin manages nothing more than unsatisfying platitudes and smugly pat realizations. Alternating between Lina and Josephine, this novel is unfortunately trite, predictable, and insensitive at its core: the lives of a 19th-century black slave and a 21st-century white lawyer are not simply comparable but mutually revealing, fodder for healing. The tragedy of Josephine leads Lina deeper into not only Josephine's history but her own, which helps her to make sense of her mother, a woman Lina never knew. Lina's father, an artist, suggests that Lina research the story of Josephine, speculated to be the real artist behind paintings attributed to Lu Anne Bell, her white master, and Lina embarks on a search that finds her retracing the footsteps of a runaway slave. (Chicago Tribune)The House Girl, the historical fiction debut by Tara Conklin, is an unforgettable story. Did you find it difficult to write from these two very different perspectives Were there any similarities between the two women I found each challenging for different reasons. Assigned to work on a class-action suit involving slavery reparations, Lina searches out a suitable plaintiff for the case, hoping to find a descendant of slaves with an especially compelling story. Assured and arresting.You cannot put it down. The House Girl follows the lives of two young women separated by more than a century and who lead very different lives, one as a slave the other a lawyer in New York City. In 2004, Lina Sparrow is a first-year associate at a prestigious New York law firm in 1852, Josephine Bell is the titular "house girl," a slave on a Virginia farm. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Lawyer-turned-writer Conklin debuts with a braided novel of two intersecting tales separated by 150 years. ![]()
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