Jessica McCann

I'm not sure where to start with this one. I read the first 90-odd pages then skimmed the rest after the historical inaccuracies and numerous small mistakes started getting to me too much.

This is a selection for the Level 12 Build Your Library curriculum my eldest is using this year, and it's the first that's left me totally disappointed. I appreciate the author's intention to bring attention to Margaret Morgan whose life and whose children's lives were shaped by a US Supreme Court case in the 1830s but whose own story has been ignored and largely lost by history, but McCann's execution could have been better.

Some problems I noted within the first 90 pages:
-Multiple small-ish errors, like:
-"mantle" instead of "mantel" for the shelf over a fireplace,
-"stillborn" as two words instead of one, and
-chickens living in a "coup" (which gave my children and I a laugh cotemplating a chicken uprising).
-The narrator refers to the many roles her home had served, including a hospital in which to birth children, but in the 1830s, no one gave birth in a hospital, so it is highly unlikely she would have made this comparison.
-The narrator removes her "brassiere" but a quick Internet check confirms that the bra wasn't invented until 1869 at the earliest and the word "brassiere" wasn't coined until 1907.

These are relatively small things, but when I see mistakes like this, I always wonder what other historical errors I'm missing.

Combine this with the uncomfortable use of dialect and the general misgivings I have about a white woman writing from the perspective of a Black woman in the antebellum United States, and I don't find this book worth the time it would take to give the whole thing a close read.

In lieu of this novel, I think I'm going to have my daughter read Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe's novel is problematic in its own ways, but it's contemporary to the period, a Classic by many measures, and it had a significant influence on Northern opinions about slavery in the lead-up to the Civil War and so has historical significance of its own. I think she and I would do better to discuss the many issues in Stowe's novel than in this one.… (mais)