Author: Maura Cheeks
Publication Information: Ballantine Books. 2024. 320 pages.
ISBN: 0593598296 / 978-0593598290
Rating: ★★★★
Book Source: I received this book through NetGalley free of cost in exchange for an honest review.
Opening Sentence: "Marcus Revel was willing to trade the illusion of his sanity to keep his home."
Favorite Quote: "Because sometimes you have to go where you're not wanted in order to change people's minds."
Philadelphia - the original capital of our nation.
Change has come. A woman serves as the United States president. The Forgiveness Act is being considered. If passed and signed. If signed, the legislation would provide up to $175,000 in reparations is a family can prove that they are descended from slaves. The nation is watching.
The author anchors this discussion in the life of Willa Revel. Long ago, she gave up a career to help the family business. She is a single parent to a daughter. She has always put her family before herself. "It was one thing to feel like your sacrifices were worth it but another to feel like you sacrificed for nothing. Was it possible to be a good person if you were always resenting the sacrifices you made to be good." The passage of the act would mean acknowledgement. The money could mean staying out of bankruptcy.
The questions this book raises are important ones that go well beyond this book:
- Can reparations ever compensate for the horrors of slavery?
- Is the thought of reparations merely to assuage the guilt of those who consider themselves representative of the enslavers?
- Can trauma inherited through the generations be remedied by monetary reparations?
- From a pieces of legislation called the "Forgiveness" Act, is forgiveness possible?
- What does forgiveness means?
- How do you put a value on the loss?
- How do you prove a family line?
- How do you prove a family line when
- people were bought and sold?
- birth records were not kept?
- a child's birth was recorded as property rather than parental lineage?
- ownership rights extended into rape and fathering of unacknowledged children?
And so many more.
What grounds this book and makes it work for me is that it is not a philosophical essay on these topics. In fact, many of these questions are not and, I don't think, can be resolved in a book such as this. To me, a packaged fictional resolution would undermine the questions.
Instead, this is very much the story of one woman and one family. It is about a search for the past and the complicated history it reveals. It is about learning where we come from and separating it from where we are going. It is about understanding. The questions and the search will stay with me for a long time.
This book is a debut novel. I look forward to reading more from the author.
Please share your thoughts and leave a comment. I would love to "talk" to you.
