Wench
A Novel

Set in the mid 19th Century, Wench offers a fictionalized account of a very real and strange practice. Southern slaveowners would vacation in a particular Ohio resort and take slave women along as their vacation partners, leaving their wives at home. The story centers on several slave women, their d......more

Today I received my copy of Wench, the new novel by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. I really loved this book. (And what a gorgeous cover!)The novel is set at Tawawa House-- an actual Ohio resort where white plantation owners vacationed with their enslaved mistresses. I know that there are some readers who are......more

Reading WENCH required me to constantly push aside my modern sensibilities. Knowing what enslaved women had to endure and in many instances convince themselves of in order to simply survive and maintain some sense of sanity is hard to accept. Lizzie is the perfect example of the divided and sometime......more

This is a good book but not a great book. The writing is not as strong as it could be. Slavery-related stories are difficult because there are just so many and at this point, when there are books as unique as, say, The Known World, any new entrants to the genre need to be exceptional to stand apart.......more

Lizzie is a woman in love, on holiday with her lover, a man married to someone else... or is she? What happens to these phrases when we add that Lizzie is a slave, and her 'lover' is her master? Wench confronts this problem from Lizzie's perspective:Inside the cottage, Lizzie felt human. She could l......more