Kidd's research appears to have been colossal. she was part of everything that stole my life,' Handful thinks. No storybook romance occurs here, nor even storybook friendship: 'Sarah had jimmied herself into my heart but at the same time.

What saves the narrative's tailspinning into a coy, Scarlett O'Hara fiddle-dee-dee-ness is the true horror revealed in routine realities for slaves during those years (torture, whippings, hangings), alongside the stunning heroism of those who resisted. Sarah has her family's furious obstinacy to fight: The Grimkés embody the vigorous, proud Southern culture in which slave owning is taken as a God-ordained right, together with the fact that women are meant to serve as decorative shadows. A pained alliance forms between the two girls that will evolve, complicatedly, through middle age. Sarah, already an instinctive humanist who has been secretly reading her father's law books - and who has witnessed a family slave's whipping - wants no part of the transaction, but is forced to comply. 'Wings' constructs, as its axis, the intertwined lives of two young girls in the early 1800s: Sarah Grimké, the middle daughter in a large, prosperous Charleston, S.C., family, and a young slave, Hetty, familiarly called Handful, bequeathed to Sarah as a personal maid on Sarah's 11th birthday. These memories resurfaced powerfully as I made my way through Sue Monk Kidd's ambitious third novel, 'The Invention of Wings.' The crucial difference? Kidd's heroes are black, alongside white ones. Their tones tended toward a crisp, triumphal can-do-ism, and what a young reader most absorbed was each woman's determination to overcome setbacks and make her mark, both interpersonally and as a political or social welfare activist. I remember names like Dolley Madison, Lucretia Mott, Louisa May Alcott, Betsy Ross, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.Įach book offered a close third-person imagining of key episodes in the subject's life, from girlhood to dotage. When I was a young girl, some of my most delicious reading came from a series of biographies of notable American women, featuring those women's silhouettes on the books' covers.

The invention of wings kidd