Song Yet Sung | James McBride | Life among the slaves

Song Yet Sung | James McBride | Intense Read---

books:

Song Yet Sung

	Song Yet Sung James McBride Riverhead Hardcover, 2008 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 23 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Life among the slaves

SONG YET SUNG by James McBride tells the story of the Dreamer, a stolen slave whose real name is Liz. Liz is captured by Patty, a white woman who steals slaves and sells them in the Deep South, but before she does, she puts them in an attic in her house under the care of Little George, who breaks them. Liz had a bullet wound to the head and it caused her to sleep a lot. While asleep, she dreamed there was a metal spike in the floor near her. When she awoke, she found herself biting away the wood around the spike. Little George comes to rape her, as he does all the women, even the Old Woman Without a Name, and Liz pulls the spike up and thrusts it into Little George's neck. The other slaves see an opportunity; they attack Little George also and all of them escape. Liz is found by another slave who treats her wound and nurses her back to health, but since her head wound, Liz can see deep into the future.

Kathy Sullivan, a white woman who lives far out on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, lost her husband and a slave to the Chesapeake Bay six months ago. She, nor Mary, the slave's wife, believe they drowned and look for them each day. Amber, a tall, good looking slave and brother to Mary, finds Liz and hides her away. The action really begins as Woolman, a mythical runaway to the white people and a reality to the black ones, begins to cause havoc on the Eastern Shore. Woolman is a huge man with wild wooly hair that hangs to his back. With extraordinary strength, and being quick on his feet he can disappear into the swamp causing even the believers to doubt their eyes. The two plots begin to blend, making for an exciting ending.

James McBride has penned a fantastic novel about slaves in the 1850s. The characters are well-developed and even though there are many of them, the two plots blend together and each person stands out on his/her own. It is a novel that should be read by all. I highly recommend it.

Reviewed by Alice Holman
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers

for more information click here

Intense Read---

Normally I would not forgive an author for stretching reality to the point of this work - a civil war slave having dreams of Martin Luther King - but this author has a quality of writing that is almost too real. His characters have texture and heft, his scenes have smell and contour and you can believe that the dreamer longs for freedom so badly that she can "conjure" MLK. I have been reading slave naratives and the history of the war between the states since being a teenager, but NEVER has a book actually TAKEN me to that time period, scared me, made me grieve and make me feel such a total part of that sad history. This is an excellent tale told by a worthy author and he deserves to be put on your best book shelf - and shared with friends. Good job!

for more information click here

Another WINNER!

Another winner by James McBride! I was a bit hesitant in the beginning as I am not a fan of "time travel" and science fiction....but was immediately won over by McBride's close attention to historical detail and unforgettable characters! He has woven a storyline that will soon not be forgotten! It will be hard picking up another book as the characters will haunt me well past the last page!!!

A mesmerizing, suspenseful tale of evil and determination

A deeply engaging and thoughtful storyteller, McBride takes the reader into the corrupt heart of the slave era in 1850 in this tale of desperation, heroism and cruelty.

The novel's catalyst is Liz Spocott, a runaway slave who dreams of a strange, alien future, which the reader will recognize as our present. "Liz had this dream in captivity, just as the flickering light of her own life was disappearing, and when she awoke from it realized with a gasp that it was some kind of apparition and she had to find its true meaning in this world before she died."

But her chances don't look good. Shackled in a stifling attic with a group of other recaptured slaves, a musket-ball wound to her head, Liz recovers consciousness only to face a rapist, a man of her own race who serves his ruthless female master by rounding up escaped slaves and indulges his sadistic lust with the captive women. But Liz is resourceful and, with little to lose and everything to gain, fights off her attacker, freeing the whole attic-full in the process.

Her journey - seeking knowledge, seeking freedom - striving to live when real freedom seems to lie only in death - involves many voices. Point of view remains in the third person but wanders across the landscape of Maryland's swampy shore, a place shaped by its proximity to freedom; the Pennsylvania border only 80 miles away.

The tantalizing beacon of freedom attracts particular sorts of people. Runaways, willing to risk death for a chance at freedom, give rise to the sorts of thugs willing to make their living as slave catchers. These gangs spread a violent miasma through the populace, sparking fear, resentment and sometimes heroism.

Among those Liz encounters is a crazed hermit, an escaped slave who lives in the shadows of the wood, with only a child to keep him tethered to the wider world. His mind is a bewildered wilderness, canny but confused, skittish of all humans, but enraged beyond caution when the white world takes his son.

Then there are the slaves who help her at great risk to themselves. And the slaves who shy from her in fear or scheme to turn her in for the reward.

And there are the slave owners. Liz's owner, a rich man with a plantation full of slaves, hires a slave catcher with a limp, a hard past, a deep sadness and quick perceptions. The widow who owns the slaves who help Liz, her life intertwined emotionally and economically with the family she owns, senses their secrets and contemplates a human sale to protect her finances.

Slavery colors everything and everyone. Good people are corrupted, evil is magnified, moral choices are hedged by greed or fear, the weak succumb to temptations or coercions that embitter their lives.

Relationships are shaped by slavery, particularly the shadowy duplicity of the double life most slaves lead. McBride explores the intricacies of the secret code the slaves worked out to communicate secretly despite the suspicious scrutiny of whites, a code that enabled many to escape.

But relations between blacks are also fraught, by the insecurity of a future not their own to choose and by the danger of love, which can be a cruel bond as strong as any chains.

Without polemics McBride explores how slavery exerts a deep, indelible harm on all it touches, with scars that leach through generations.

Liz's visions extend the reach of history into the future along a path that rouses dismay and disgust in Liz who believes freedom should raise up her fellow slaves, whose faults are rooted in slavery and whose bravery is in spite of it.

McBride's second novel (after "The Miracle at St. Anna" and the memoir "The Color of Water") is an action-packed story of the violence people willingly do to one another (particularly but not only to those they view as property) full of memorable and horrible characters and imbued with a deep, aching vision of life during slavery and its long, lingering legacy.

for more information click here

ENTHRALLING AND BEAUTIFUL......

Liz Spocott is a beautiful runaway slave...captured by the infamous Patty Cannon and her gang and being left for practically dead in an attic surrounded by other unfortunates, Liz is the catalyst for a revolt and subsequent escape...costing Patty and her gang a fortune. Liz--who has always been plagued by prophetic dreams and second sight--is soon legendary amongst the slaves and freemen of the eastern shore of Maryland...inciting thoughts of freedom amongst slaves and unease amidst their owners. Soon Liz becomes the most sought-after woman of color in the region...; some for money, others for inspiration; and for at least one person in particular...love. A compelling, lyrical tale of the tightly woven network of slaves and their relationships; with their masters, and most especially with each other. Most intriguing are the details involving the non-verbal method of communication that slaves used. A story so rich in detail and historical fact that it is almost lyrical in its telling. A must read.

DYB

for more information click here

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5

products you might be interested in