Secure Your Copy The House Girl Scripted By Tara Conklin Released Through Interactive EBook

Disclosure I went to high school with Tara but haven't seen her since we graduatedIt was an odd experience to read a book by someone with whom I was a teenager I spent the first few pages being overly judgmental about grammar and comma placement Sorry Tara But within about five or six pages it stopped being about High School Friend now Author Tara and all about the characters and the storyThis first novel tells the powerful and compelling story of Josephine a slave in Virginia in the mid nineteenth century and Lina a young lawyer for a prestigious New York law firm in the present Lina's firm has just taken on a case that will deal with slavery reparations and Lina is searching for a descendent of slaves to act as the plaintiff This will make an excellent book club pick or vacation read Although the themes leave you with plenty to discuss ponder and contemplate the story moves uickly and powerfully to its conclusion essentially making it a fast read that will stick with you long after you finish it Feeling a little guilty by not explaining mystar rating so here is my review that I submitted to Outstanding ratings historical fiction captivating subject on all counts I should have loved this book Unfortunately the writer's narrative descriptions were unbearable She describes everything in laborious detail even the most inane subjects and banal situations Don't get me wrong I love descriptive writing but this was complete overkill Here is an excerpt from Conklin's description of Lina's law officeLina exited the elevator and walked the east corridor toward her office To her left the secretaries buzzed and clacked and sipped The secretaries were an exotic unfathomable breed prone to wearing elasticized waistbands and acrylic fingernails that clattered in a high pitched musical way across a keyboard The secretaries never asked uestions They deciphered the lawyers' scrawl as best they could settled into their ergonomically correct workstations suspended all independent thought all personal conviction and typed To Lina's right half open office doors allowed her glimpses of heads bowed over papers or fixed tightly to the glow of a computer screen or cradling a gray telephone headset between on and on it goesI closed the book at pageMaybe I didn't give it a fair shake but if something moves me to the point that I want to chuck the book through my plate glass window then I should on all counts stop the madness It's hard to believe that this is a debut novel Tara Conklin has beautifully written an emotional story of a young woman slave in Virginia inand skillfully connects that story to a young woman an attorney living in present day New York City She brings history to life with Josephine's story and we see the cruelties of slavery the desire for freedom and the courageous fight for it I love the alternating narratives of Josephine and Lina and how Lina's story helps unfold the story of Josephine the artist The writing is so good that you can almost see the paintings as they are described and almost feel what the characters feelI have read a number of books recently which use the mechanism of alternating narratives of past and present and I really like it when the stories truly connect in an important way The author has done just that I was so taken with Josephine and I found Lina's story captivating as well Josephine's story will break your heart but what Lina does to insure that Josephine's story is told is ultimately uplifting Started out pretty good but the main character in the present Lina Sparrow just seemed to get stupider and stupider as the story progressed Has she never heard of Ancestrycom Also that missive from Caleb Harper that explained just about EVERYTHING about Josephine and her baby was just too convenient And the story line about her mother was completely ridiculous and unbelievable Again if she was curious about her mother's death and was too spineless to force the uestion with her father all she had to do was look for the death certificate Certainly an attorney could manage that simple task If her mother had actually died in a car crash she certainly could have found an archived newspaper article about it Not finding evidence of her mom's death would have been a red flag Sorry Lina you are just too dumb to be an attorney or even an average citizen of thest century Read this book only if you like really stupid characters I liked the beginning of this book and thought it had a lot of promise I liked the way the two stories were set during slavery and the present I often like dual narration and get absorbed by two different viewpoints I like the topic of slave reparations wondering at the outset how we could ever be so arrogant as to think we could repair our actions in any meaningful way I expected the author to give me some food for thoughtInstead it just progressively annoyed me until I had to force myself to finish it This book was totally overwritten The author tried too darn hard to make this book weighty with truths She refused to edit herself and pare away the redundancies She beat us over the head in sentences like Truth was multilayered shifting it was different for everyone each personal history carved uniue from the same weighty block of time and flesh Plus this book could probably win a prize for the most commas ever used by an American writer Now on to the plotting Yuck This book runs rampant with incredible coincidences Just in the nick of time all the plot pieces come together Lina the high powered lawyer is an utterly unlikeable character who feels like a caricature Josephine although easy to like gets lost in the horrendous subplotsI did not care about any of the many subplots Letters were used repeatedly to advance the plot They were detailed and tiring This topic deserves a better book I don't often review a book but I have to say something about this one I just have to wonder about all thestar andstar ratings here This book is readable certainly but not at all the page turner I expected from hearing others idolize it The present day character Lina is a lawyer in a high powered NY firm looking for a plaintiff to represent a class action lawsuit on behalf of slaves brought to the United States who were obviously never compensated for their work The book moves between Lina and Josephine a house girl slave in thes working for a Mr and Missus sic Bell Mr Bell is not having good luck with his crops and feeling soured treats Josephine cruelly while Missus Bell or less seems to take a maternal

interest in her At any rate the characters of the past seem far better developed than Lina her bosses and co workers her father and the artsy crowd around themThat's okay though and forgivable It's the absolutely ridiculous thread that runs throughout where Lina feels she is not being told the truth about her mother's death in a car accident when Lina was a small child and when she can't seem to get a straight answer from her father she just accepts it She is an attorney for pete's sake and is doing realms of research on this case If you want to know how someone died take a taxi to City Hall and ask for the Department of Vital Statistics As my relatives in Scotland used to say they'll always tell you who's been hatched matched and dispatchedAnyway I couldn't let that little detail slip by That being said The idea that Josephine was the real artist behind the priceless pictures painted and drawn by Missus Bell is an interesting one and the historical settings and information are interesting as well But the book is way too long and I find that I don't really care very much about Lina Or her disappeared mother Too much going on I confess I skimmed at times I did make it through to the end Two remarkable women separated by than a century whose lives unexpectedly intertwineLina Sparrow is an ambitious young lawyer working on a historic class action lawsuit seeking reparations for the descendants of American slavesJosephine is a seventeen year old house slave who tends to the mistress of a Virginia tobacco farman aspiring artist named Lu Anne BellIt 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 JosephineA descendant of Josephine's would be the per fect face for the lawsuitif Lina can find one But nothing is known about Josephine's fate following Lu Anne Bell's death inIn piecing together Josephine's story Lina embarks on a journey that will lead her to uestion her own life including the full story of her mother's mysterious death twenty years beforeAlternating 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 important than justice I felt annoyed by this book The law suite was impossible and ridiculous It was like the author started the first half of the book thinking it was a great idea and then through her own research realized it was never going to pan out Instead of re writing the whole story she simply used one of her characters to explain why the law suit wasn't going to work and from that point on in the book the author had to change her perspective and create a new reason for the modern day side of the story to be relevantThe side of the book that featured the Plantation Slave girl was interesting but extremely repetitive The author forced us to re read the slave girl's life story over and over again each time adding a tiny bit of something newI felt like the author started writing the first chapter and never stopped she'd keep going until she hit a snag and instead of going back to change the book she just stopped that theme and continued on with a different a different one This book was compared to The Help and was suppose to be on of the To Read books of the year I'd have to disagree with both statements.