Access Remembered Conceived By Yvonne Battle-Felton Shown In Version

by dialoguebooks

This book was atmospheric, haunting, brutal and so wellwritten,
I felt pretty smug about the fact that I had added this book to my list just a few days before it was longlisted for the Womens Prize and Im happy to say that the excitement I felt was completely justified.


I always find books that depict the realities of slavery difficult to read and this book was no exception, however, I also think that we should continue to read them, regardless.
We shouldnt be allowed to forget that lives were lived in this way and that whilst slavery may have been abolished, its ghosts continue to haunt us.


Yvonne BattleFelton doesnt spare the reader or allow you to get too comfortable, however, her writing transports you to another time and place and allows you to get completely lost in the world of its central characters.
At its heart, Remembered is a story about what lies behind our silence, the things we dont say, the truths that need to be told and the hope for a freedom that might come from telling them.
Overall, Id highly recommend this one and if youre a fan of Jesmyn Ward or Colson Whitehead this definitely might be one to look into! I wish I had been more captivated but alas.
I'll write a longer review soon, This book is a gem and a half! I won't lie, Remembered wasn't even on my radar before the Women's Prize longlist was annouced a few weeks ago.
And even then, it wasn't one that jumped out at me for me to go and get that all changed when the lovely people at Dialogue Books/Little Brown asked if I wouldn't mind reading this for review.
. and I have two thoughts about this one, that I am extremely grateful to them because otherwise this book may never have fallen into my hands and, two, that I think this book has been sorely underrepresented in what seems to have been a lack of a marketing campaign.
Like seriously, I saw it nowhere before the longlist annoucement,

That said, this book is amazing it takes you though the heartbreaking history of a family as they suffer the trials, humiliations and pure cruelties along the road from enslavement to freedom.
We see a young, free girl kidnapped to 'breed', young mother's kill their children so that at least then they are free, men escape only to find that it is too dangerous for them to come back for their wives and mothers, children grow up not daring to even truly hope that one day ONE DAY they will be free.


It takes an amazing writer to pull a dual narrative, a criminal mystery, a family saga and a depiction of the historical events behind the ongoing systematic racism which still haunts society to this day.
And Yvonne BattleFelton has done this she has done it in a beautifully crafted narrative and in a novel which pulls you in and shows you what makes people family, what you can be willing to do for the ones that you love.


This is an incredible novel and I hope it gets widely read, It deserves to make the shortlist and if it doesn't I WILL be ranting about it in my Instagram stories, Remembered is the story of Spring, who was a young woman when slavery was abolished, and whose son, Edward is dying in a hospital bed.
Edward, a striking member of the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company, reportedly intentionally drove a speeding trolley into a department store, He was then dragged out of the streetcar and beaten brutally by a crowd, At Spring's side in the hospital is the ghost of her sister, Tempe, Edward's birth mother,

Spring is telling Edward the story of his family as the lived through the final years of slavery on a farm in Maryland, under the brutal Walker family.
While fictional as well as nonfiction narratives accounts of the lives of enslaved Africans and African Americans are plentiful, this story told from the perspective of Spring, takes us through the years after slavery into the beginning of theth century.
Spring is a resilient woman, and her sister, Tempe, is so strong, she lingers on as a ghost, This is a story full of strong women's voices, who are remarkable survivors,

Post Civil War Philadelphia was a city with a sizable population of "free" African Americans before the abolition of slavery.
Pennsylvania borders Maryland and the MasonDixon Line along this border, established the boundary between the states the allowed slavery, and those states which prohibited it.
Spring and other freed slaves from Maryland and further south flooded Philadelphia after their liberation, The author creates a familiar type of discourse among the longtime residents against the newcomers "they're making it hard for us to get jobs", "they're pulling down for wages because they'll work for almost nothing".
This was eerily parallel to current arguments about immigrants in the United States, I don't know if BattleFelton invented this discord, or whether there are historical records, As it occurred within the Black Community, it is less likely we'd have the kind of documentation we might find in our times which might show up in political discourse in public speeches or the media.
However, it is believable that these kinds of conflicts may have occurred,
Thetransit strike really happened, I could not find an account of an incident of a trolley driving into a store, However, there was a strikebreaker who drove a speeding trolley into a crowd, while holding a revolver in one hand, The National Guard

was brought in to control the strikers, rioting broke out, and then a General Strike paralyzed parts of the East Coast with walkouts, leading the public to sympathize with the transportation workers sitelink wikipedia. org/wiki/Philade .

Dr. BattleFelton, born in the US, lives in the UK where she is an associate lecturer at Lancaster University, This novel is a nominee on theWomen's Fiction Longlist, She is the recipient of a Northern Writers Award, This is a compelling story and a book that was hard to put down, Simon Savidge's review pushed me to get it, As of April,, it has not been published in the U, S. Remembered is the story of Spring and her sister Tempe, girls born into slavery on a farm in Maryland just before the end of the Civil War.
But more than just a slave narrative, Yvonne BattleFelton asks us to examine the lives of Black Americans once slavery is ended, and what possibilities exist when, despite abolishment, there still exists deep and blatant racism, even in the North.
It's a fresh and thoughtprovoking story that I think every American should read, I give it all the!

This novel was long listed for the Women's Prize for Fiction and has not been published in the U.
S. yet, but I have been told it will be released here next year, I picked this up because it was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and it was such a surprise, The writing pulled me in immediately and although this was brutal and gutwrenching at times, I couldn't stop reading, The characters were so rich and captivating and the relationships, especially between the two sisters we meet in the beginning, were beautifully portrayed.
The latter part of the story happens during the emancipation and I found that journey particularly interesting and eyeopening, So glad this jumped on my radar because of the Women's Prize! It isand Philadelphia is burning,

The last place Spring wants to be is in the rundown, colored section of a hospital surrounded by the groans of sick people and the ghost of her dead sister.
But as her son Edward lays dying, she has no other choice,

There are whispers that Edward drove a streetcar into a shop window, Some people think it was an accident, others claim that it was his fault, the police are certain that he was part of a darker agenda.
Is he guilty Can they find the truth

All Spring knows is that time is running out, She has to tell him the story of how he came to be, With the help of her dead sister, newspaper clippings, and reconstructed memories, she must find a way to get through to him.
To shatter the silences that governed her life, she will do everything she can to lead Edward home,.s

My hope is that more people will read this story with an open heart and not rush to compare it to Toni Morrison's sitelinkBeloved.
I also hope that it will be read with curiosity rather than assumption regarding portrayals of slavery in novels,

Remembered has me thinking about what makes family and how do we remember and imagine people and events of personal history when that history has been stolen, sold, bought, lacerated, distorted, denied, and erased

The story also touches on the complicated intersection where free black life and enslaved black life collide, overlap, join.
This is theth of thebooks on thewomen's prize longlist that I have read, I will not be reading the other four unless they make the longlist, as I must now turn my attention to theMBI longlist.


In a word this book is heartbreaking, It opens with anewspaper article concerning a runaway trolley and a black man who is either driving it into a store or trying to stop it.
The man, Edward Freeman, is Spring's boy, Spring, accompanied by the spirit of her dead sister Tempe who only Spring can see, rush to the hospital and find that Edward is in a coma in the "colored" wing of the hospital.
Tempe, knowing that Edward will not survives, insists that Spring tell him the story or more accurately, the stories of their family so that when he dies he will know the spirits he needs to know.
So Spring, using a book with clippings and notes, begins at the beginning inwhen a young Philadelphia girl named Ella is kidnapped.


Young Ella, late getting home, takes a shortcut through the woods and finds herself caught by Walker, a slave owner from Maryland looking for a young female black woman.
Ella does not go calmly, Back at the Walker Place, Walker and his father hope she is not tainted and will break the curse that aborts and thwarts pregnancies.
Little James is chosen as the guinea pig to see whether or not she is tainted, After he carries on as if he is in pain, so the Walker men tag her as tainted, Young Walker decides she ain't tainted for everything, failing to appreciate that Ella is not only a fighter but also a biter.
He beats her hard for that,

Agnes, the only child to survive on the farm, drags her to Mama Skins aka Meredith, Mama Skins is a skilled medicine woman and she heals Ella, Agnes and Ella become friends and promise each other that, along with Little James Agnes' boyfriend, they will get to freedom together.
They never make it but two of their descendants do,

As the story goes on, it focuses on the lives of the daughters of Ella and Agnes Spring and Tempe who think they are twins with Tempe born first, breaking the curse, and Spring born second, reintroducing the curse.
We learn what's behind the curse, we live through emancipation and its violence, we see what happens when the former slaves go North and that violence.


Some final points
Stories are really important in this novel, It is through stories that Spring learns about and talks about her family and those in her life,
Haints are real but you won't see them unless there's a connection,
Heathens aren't lesser people,

And finally, what the author said about her book
I wanted the novel to speak to the pain and justified anger of generations.
To implicitly show the parallels between our present and our past to unpeel the legacies of slavery, oppression and hatred, I want the novel to open conversations, If we recognize that we are haunted by the past, maybe, together, we can exorcise it, See sitelink com/journal/ar
.