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Feb 24, 2017
Sarah Grimke is given a slave girl - Handful - as a birthday present on her 11th birthday. Even though Sarah has grown up on a plantation in the South where slavery has always been a part of her life, she recoils from the present. Even though she doesn't want a slave and is opposed to the very idea of slavery, she finds that there is no way she can give Handful back or free her. Sarah and Handful alternate telling the story of their lives, which are forever connected by this strange master/slave bond. One of the interesting parallels in the book is to see the relationship that each of them has with her mother. Handful is close to her mother, yet throughout the books he finds our more and more secrets about her mother's life--secrets that were often hidden from her to protect her from awful realities. She ends up drawing a lot of inspiration from her mother's strength and courage. Sarah's relationship with her mother is very strained however, as her mother wants her to grow up to be the typical southern woman and Sarah chooses instead to be an abolitionist and a Quaker. There are hints though that her mother is only trying to get Sarah to accept the limitations that women faced at that time, and that she fears that Sarah will have a hard life is she tries to buck the system. This was a great book for discussion, and our book discussion group had an engaging talk about the many issues it covered. Sarah Grimke was a real person and she and her sister Angelina were abolitionists, public speakers, and authors. One of the things I enjoyed most about this book was learning about them and their place in history as they pushed the boundaries of what women were allowed to do during that time period. I definitely recommend this novel to anyone interested in history, racial relations, and how slavery affects human relationships.