📝 Okay so I gather this was like, a historically important book. One of the first historical romances to feature Black love and become commercially successful. I can definitely see the appeal, but the book was originally published in 1996 and it does feel a little dated, which is maybe a weird thing to say about a historical. Things just seemed a little more sedate, I guess? Overall it was just a little more old fashioned than I like. But it was still a good book!

🤓 I liked that there were real historically relevant things in the text. It's kind of hard to avoid them, since we're talking about Black people in the antebellum United States (1858-59), but it's still good to have the details. Multiple references to the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scott decision....not really sure how John Brown and Harper's Ferry was relevant to the love story, it felt like it was shoehorned in, but I'm all for including an armed insurrection in the text. Thinking back to what the average reader in 1996 might have known about the history of abolition, a lot of this was likely educative to them. Hey, even to a lot of readers now, it's probably at least somewhat new information.

🎧 The narration was a bit stiff, but the audio was produced a decade ago so that kind of fits I guess. Only one female narrator, although the POV switches between his and hers throughout. She does not change intonation or anything when she switches POVs.

🌶️ 3/5 there were a bunch of encounters but the steamy stuff overall was definitely more... flowery/roundabout language than I'm used to reading from more recently published books.

Dear god how did this take me so long to read. Ms. Bev is an artist. A revelation. A genius. A gift to us all. 

Read the content warnings - it’s a book about slavery and the Underground Railroad so it’s not a light read in many spots. But GOD does it rise out of the pain and deliver joy and beauty and pleasure, the things intended for and deserved by all people, no matter the limits of the time. Hester and Galen are a dream couple. Only Galen Vachon could have pulled off that church scene and had me on his side. 

I don’t feel I’m exaggerating in the slightest to say this feels like Austen - sumptuous, beautiful, sweeping, discussion of class and the struggles of the time, different, rich characters all struggling over the same tough questions. What is love and what makes us risk it all for it? If we are lucky enough to find and to recognize true love, are we brave enough to grab it with both hands, in spite of our baggage, our insecurities, our past, all the stories we tell ourselves about how we do not deserve the love we seek and the love we find?

Also I have never been so aroused by vanilla in my whole life and I don’t think I’ll ever smell it again without thinking of Galen Vachon tracing that Madagascar vanilla extract all over La Petite Indigo (in case you were wondering - yes it bangs and DOES IT EVER BANG!!!).

Just go get this book. I’ll buy it for you, I’ll drive you to the library, I’ll ship it to you. Just read it!!