The synopsis doesn’t do the book justice. The whole time I thought that Pheby would reconnect with her “true love” and find a happy ending. I was wrong. This story is about resilience, growth, and what it means to be a mother. 

Admittedly I couldn’t stand Pheby at the start of this book and everything seemed so tame to start with that I was annoyed and bored. The story picks up quickly, though. Through the years of being the mistress/slave to a sadist man and having his children and one child before him with a runaway slave, Pheby grows into the person she needs to be and the person everybody else needs her to be. She never loses her compassion and her sense of self-worth. She makes hard decisions after hard decision to protect her children and the other slaves. 

Once this book truly got going there were scenes that made me feel sick but I felt a duty to continue. It can be a tough read but it is a worthy one. As someone who is biracial myself, I was worried that there would be many characters that shit on Pheby for being mixed race as well, something that I often see in different types of media. That wasn’t the case though. The author allowed Pheby to be her own person. 

My main gripes with this book are the slow start and the abrupt ending. There are graphic scenes of slavery in this book and some made me want to pull my eyes away. The epilogue did make me want to cry, though.