Tara Conklin

Lina Sparrow is an ambitious young lawyer working on a historic class-action suit seeking reparations for the descendants of American slaves. 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. Alternating between antebellum Virginia and modern-day New York, The House Girl is a searing tale of art, history, love, and secrets that intertwines the stories of two remarkable women.

A Novel

The House Girl

a novel

The house girl

Jennifer McNeil

I was so excited to read this book! It was a bit slow to start (I sometimes find it difficult to dive right into a book so that could just be me), but it picked up pace and really drew me in. Unfortunately, the plot then veered off in an unexpected way and lost me. I wasn't super thrilled with the way the author chose to end off the story. It all felt rather rushed and sort of did a disservice to the story that could have been told and WAS being told up to a point. I don't think I'll be reading anything from this author anytime soon.

All that being said, I did enjoy the characters the author created and the beautiful settings she brought to life. That, for me, really saved the book from being 1 or 2 stars.

Kerry Gibbons

This book was not what I expected really. It was told in a bit of a roundabout way that I think, actually, for me, took away a lot of the power of Josephine's story because so much of it was told through the eyes of a 24-year-old white lawyer. There were some interesting insights about race and the meaning of heritage, but I saw most of the major plot turns coming from the first chapters and that bothered me. At times I got frustrated with the book and had to stop because perhaps the storyline would change back to Lina when I was really into Josephine's story... 

Finally, in the last few pages of the book, the book lost all sense of realism when Lina told Jasper she'd meet him in 10-15 minutes in Grand Central. WHEN STANDING ON THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY CAMPUS. In the middle of a workday. I know it might sound knit-picky, but if you are going to set a novel in New York City, a very well-known place that MANY PEOPLE PERHAPS READING YOUR BOOK ARE HIGHLY FAMILIAR WITH, you should do research on how long it takes to get from one place to another before specifying anything in your book. Everything would have been fine if she had instead written something like, "I said I'd meet him there by 3:15". I don't know what time it is currently in the book. That could be five minutes from now or three hours. No sense.

Overall, I liked the book I think though I struggled with some of the storytelling.

Tori Carrillo

I like the idea of this book and what this book potentially could have been, but I wasn't a huge fan of how it was written nor some of the story line (particularly the mess about Lina's mother). I wouldn't necessarily say it was a waste of my time, I enjoyed it enough, but I probably wouldn't recommend it to others.

Andrea Badgley

At a time when I am struggling to find ethnic US authors for a reading project, this book, which deals with the very issue I am confronted with on my reading project - the legacy of slavery - could not have come at a better time. With gentle strokes, Conklin paints thought-provoking pictures of the anonymity of slaves, their uncredited contributions to culture, of art, of the arbitrariness of race, and of the low state from which the African American population has had to rise. 

The House Girl is masterfully structured, bringing Josephina, an artist slave girl whose paintings were credited to her white Missus, into the present via Lina Sparrow, a young New York lawyer who is working to find a plaintiff for a reparations lawsuit for the descendants of American slaves. Conklin is not heavy handed in her rendering of the story, and in fact does as beautiful a job portraying the importance of art as she does showing the still rippling effects of the US slave trade. I particularly loved her explorations of skin tone, and how subjective the distinction is between black and white, Caucasian and African American, after all these years of intermingling bloodlines.

I took a break from my Andrea Reads America reading project to read this for book club, so I read for pleasure and did not take notes. I think this will be one to return to, to underline and star, to record favorite quotes, and to keep on my shelf when I want a well told story full of issues and points of view that are important to me.

The House Girl A Novel

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