Angry and simultaneously resistant in his own way to this abuse, Wash is able to find a way back to tenderness with Pallas, a slave horribly and repeatedly sexually violated by a trio of white brothers, who is brought back from the living dead through her connection to the land and healing.Ĭonklin’s The House Girl weaves multiple stories across time and place- modern-day New York-with a white woman lawyer named Lina, and Josephine, a house girl sexually abused by her master, who turns to painting as a release and finally escapes to a short-lived freedom. Wash, a slave in Tennessee, is repeatedly sexually abused and sexually abuses others as a stud for his down-at-the-heels master. Wrinkle’s Wash, the more controversial of the two, as it treats studding and brutal scenes of sexual abuse, writes rather beautifully of a horrible epoch in our nation’s history. Whether they are Kathryn Stockett’s sisters or Margaret Mitchell’s great-granddaughters, these writers approach their subject matter with a discernable sensitivity lacking in the works written by their literary antecedents. Featuring two remarkable, unforgettable heroines, Tara Conklin's The House Girl is riveting and powerful, literary fiction at its very best.Wash and The Housegirl represent interesting entrees into historical fiction about slavery written by white women. In piecing together Josephine's story, Lina embarks on a journey that will lead her to question her own life, including the full story of her mother's mysterious death twenty years before.Īlternating between antebellum Virginia and modern-day New York, this searing tale of art and history, love and secrets explores what it means to repair a wrong, and asks whether truth can be more important than justice. But nothing is known about Josephine's fate following Lu Anne Bell's death in 1852.

It is through her father, renowned artist Oscar Sparrow, that Lina discovers a controversy rocking the art world: art historians now suspect that the revered paintings of Lu Anne Bell, an antebellum artist known for her humanizing portraits of the slaves who worked her Virginia tobacco farm, were actually the work of her house slave, Josephine.Ī descendant of Josephine's would be the perfect face for the lawsuit-if Lina can find one. Ģ004: Lina Sparrow is an ambitious young lawyer working on a historic class-action lawsuit seeking reparations for the descendants of American slaves.ġ852: Josephine is a seventeen-year-old house slave who tends to the mistress of a Virginia tobacco farm-an aspiring artist named Lu Anne Bell. Two remarkable women, separated by more than a century, whose lives unexpectedly intertwine. The House Girl, the historical fiction debut by Tara Conklin, is an unforgettable story of love, history, and a search for justice, set in modern-day New York and 1852 Virginia.

'Assured and arresting.You cannot put it down.'' (Chicago Tribune)

The House Girl by Tara Conklin