The Kitchen House

by Kathleen Grissom

[ibeforem]

I thought this was a beautiful read. I especially liked the dual narration of Lavinia and Belle. Lavinia is young and often naive, so you don’t always get the full story from her point of view. Belle gives us the darker side of the truth. Lavinia and Belle are interesting characters, but as leads, they react much as you would expect them to throughout the book. For me, the most interesting character was Marshall, the Captain’s son. I really felt the most sympathy for him, despite his mostly evil presence in the book. He was a young impressionable boy whose only male role models (of his color) were an abusive, violent racist and a sexually abusive authority figure because his father was more in love with the sea than with his own family. I think Marshall wanted to be good, but he just didn’t know how. I felt the Captain was actually a decent man, and things would have been much different if he’d spent more time at home. I did enjoy the slaves of the plantation and their interactions with each other, but they fit molds that one would expect.

Overall, I thought this book gave us a unique point of view of slavery and life on a plantation, and it felt authentic for the time period and location (in my part of the world, no less!). The subject of enslaved white people is one that’s not often explored, and I appreciated this deviation from the usual.