The Kitchen House: A Novel Kindle Edition

"The Kitchen House"After reading "The Kitchen House" I believe that Kathleen Grissom has crafted an absorbing historical tale that probes the darkest edges in this villainous period of American history by employing an extraordinary and distinctive approach. The author cleverly created two contrasting protagonists, Lavinia, the white girl-to-woman, and Belle, the mixed race slave, to move the story alternately from their separate perspectives; Ms. Grissom guides the reader into the deepest reaches of the soul of each character in the book. For me, at least, this memorable cast of characters, from the good ones to the downright evil ones seems to have established permanent residence in my thoughts. While I agree with M. Jacobsen's comment that Belle's chapters could have been longer (I really loved Belle), I don't believe her role to be less significant than Lavinia's. Lavinia, as a white person observes and shares the slave experience from within. This approach is unique, I think. At least, I don't recall encountering the technique in literature, and I found it extremely compelling.The actual historical events of the period are less prominent than the actions, emotions and motivations of the people who live on either side of the implied, but not to be violated, boundary between the races. I think that the complicated relationships between Lavinia and Belle, Mama, and many of the other characters, allow the reader to discover tiny, but significant, cracks in this boundary through which the plot races along from crisis to crisis and then to the shocking, yet fitting conclusion.Ms. Grissom obviously conducted exhaustive research into the time period of the book. As a born Canadian, she must be commended. In the book she succeeded in describing the customs, mores and artifacts of this period in a clear and entertaining way. Often, when reading a novel, I tend to skip over descriptive passages so as not to interrupt plot progression and character development. In "The Kitchen House" I found the descriptions and details charming and sometimes melancholy. Who can forget, now, what a vasculum is, or forget the image of little slave children pulling the cords of the ceiling fans in the dining rooms to cool their masters on stifling summer days?I enjoyed reading this book so much that I bought several extra copies to share a very inspiring and special reading experience with special people. So, Ms. Grissom - will we be finding out what happens to the "Kitchen House" characters in the next generation? Kathleen Grissom's powerful first novel leaves me eagerly awaiting the next, whether or not it is a sequel or a totally new historical novel from a totally different perspective.Reviewer,D. Eckert

This is the second book about a slave family that I've recently read. The first was Breena Clarke's fine novel, Stand the Storm. Both deal with Black families struggling to care for each other and to cope under a system of slavery that deprives them of power and recognition of their status as human beings.Both books also depict the complications in the lives of slaves who are half-white, the frequent result when slave owners and overseers took advantage of slave women. (I was drawn to this theme right now because my own first novel - As Far as Blood Goes, about a fugitive slave who becomes a doctor - also cast the protagonist as his master's son. I wrote it over 20 years ago, but have just finished editing it for Amazon Kindle formatting.)As Breena Clarke won some renown as a writer when her first book was featured on Oprah's Book Club, I wondered if Kathleen Grissom's novel could "compete" in my estimation. Actually I found The Kitchen House the more compelling. Once I'd read the free sample on my Kindle, I immediately pressed the Buy button and could barely put the book down till I came to the last page.I don't mean this review as a comparison of the two novels, but will mention that the family of seamstresses and tailor in Stand the Storm, are the property of a master who brutally rapes and impregnates nearly every female slave on his plantation, selling his own offspring with impunity. By contrast, the situation at Tall Oaks plantation, where The Kitchen House is set, is more nuanced. Though I hesitate to take issue with Clarke, I found Grissom's historical depiction more believable.Cap'n Pyke, the plantation owner in The Kitchen House, does have a child by one of his slaves. But the captain is at bottom a well meaning man, though one whose vision is limited by his times and the slave-based society he has grown up in. So he genuinely cares for his daughter, Belle, yet shunts her aside when he finally brings home a wife at the age of 40.Belle has been brought up in the "big house" - the plantation house -- till age seven by her white grandma (Cap'n Pyke's mother), who has accepted her as a grandchild. But when the captain brings home the wife he hopes will take over the reins of the plantation after his mother's death, he has Belle abruptly evicted from this home. Now, as cook for the big house, she presides over the kitchen house, which also serves as her home. (In fine Southern houses of the period the kitchen was located in a separate building.)And when two Irish immigrants, on the ship Cap'n Pyke owns and is captain of, die on the journey before they can repay their passage, he thinks nothing of separating their two youngsters -- depriving each of the only family they have left. The older child, a boy, is easy to place as an indentured servant. Lavinia - not quite seven, thin as a rail and too traumatized even to eat - is brought home and handed over to Belle to help out in the kitchen with no great care as to whether she thrives or dies.Cap'n Pyke means to do right by his family and his slaves, but he is an absentee plantation owner, an absentee husband and an absentee father. On his visits home, he sees what he wants to see - something I found very believable. It is his neglect and his decisions that set a series of horrific events in motion - but the story is told not by him, but in alternating chapters by Belle and Lavinia.In many ways, theirs are parallel stories. Both have lost their families and their place in the world at just about the same age - Lavinia through the death of her parents, and Belle when her grandmother dies without warning. And both cling to what family is left to them, even at the expense of freedom or independence. In fact, Grissom's novel is not so much a novel about history or about slavery - though the lives of the characters are defined by their times and by the slave society they live in - as about family.I found it very believable that the orphaned Lavinia, treated with concern and kindness by Belle and by Mama Mae and Papa George - the couple who are matriarch and patriarch of the house slaves -- would grow to love them as her adopted family. And I found it likewise believable that Belle, too, would cling to her family of fellow slaves and the only home she has known rather than accept the "freedom papers" her white father halfheartedly offers. (Belle tells us her story as it is happening -- unlike Lavinia, who narrates as an adult looking back on her childhood and coming-of-age years - but her childhood is already over when the book begins. She describes it in the second chapter, so this is not a spoiler.)The setting and history of The Kitchen House are impeccably researched and beautifully woven into the story. The descriptions are evocative of time and place, and Grissom is an extremely able story-teller. Nor does she sugarcoat the institution of slavery, though her story is narrated by a white indentured servant and a relatively privileged house slave. (The absentee, Cap'n Pyke, for instance puts a harsh overseer in charge of the field slaves, whose children are fed from a trough like pigs.)The events of The Kitchen House are also great soap opera - and I mean this as praise, not putdown - and are set into motion largely by Cap'n Pyke's decision to keep Belle's parentage secret. This is the root of dramatic misunderstandings and events. When the book begins -- after a terrifying prologue set 20 years in the future -- Belle is a beautiful young woman of eighteen, to whom the captain pays private visits and gives small gifts. Not knowing the real reasons for her husband's favorable treatment of Belle, Miss Martha, the captain's wife, is free to draw her own conclusions.Although this makes for a gripping plot, that this would remain a secret from Cap'n Pyke's wife and family was the one sticking-point for me. Belle has told us that she was moved from the big house when the captain married Miss Martha "because the cap'n don't want Miss Martha to know about me." Still, there is not a slave on the plantation who does not know or guess that he has fathered her.In the nonfiction book The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South, the plantation-raised author Mary Boykin Chesnut is quoted as writing, "Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds...." The implication of course, is that the mistress is willfully not seeing, but Miss Martha is portrayed as genuinely not seeing.The implication too is that these "mulatto" children are the subject of much gossip among the ladies of the various plantations. Kathleen Grissom has taken care to make Tall Oaks unusually isolated, and during the months of the captain's sea voyages, his wife could not travel on her own, nor did she entertain visitors. Still, I found it hard to swallow that no one, whether white neighbor or trusted house slave, would set her straight even as disaster piled upon disaster. If not for this, I would give the book an unqualified Five.However, despite my difficulty with "the willing suspension of disbelief" on this point, I found The Kitchen House one of the most compelling and thought-provoking novels I've read in some time. And I'm hoping the author's characters will continue unfolding their stories to her; I know I'm not the only reader hoping for a sequel!

I must confess that this isn't the first time I have read this book. The story of an indentured Irish servant that finds herself on a Virginian plantation in the late 18th/early 19th century.One of the most incredible books that I have ever read.

Very good historical fiction.Pleasure to read.

Narration and action slow down as the end approaches.

The Kitchen House, set in the late 1700s and early 1800s, in Virginia, is a gripping novel about a white (Lavinia) and a black woman (Belle), traversing through love, betrayal, tragedies and myriad circumstances of life, whilst shackled in the reins of slavery.Based on Black History and Black Slavery in America, the finesse with which the author doles out the different characters, their feelings and their countless ordeals, leaves us no room but to completely merge into the book and become a part of their family. Reading this novel based on historical fiction genre, it's not at all easy to make out that this is the author's debut novel! It makes one introspect into one's own life and the blessings of time to truly know and revere the meaning of 'living freely' and makes it almost impossible for the reader to put the book down until the very end. Be ready for goosebumps all the way.A New York Times Bestseller, The Kitchen House totally changed my perspective towards life, to not take things for granted and to be grateful for all things bestowed on me. It taught me: in this world, being constant subject to baseless discrimination of sorts, highlighting that of race and color, if there is one string that binds the whole universe, it's one and only~Love. I am indebted to this book and it will always be one of my most favorite English novels of all times.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It took you through a journey of a negro family and a young Irish girl that they took in and made her feel she belonged somewhere. I did like the fact it was not too graphical in description of any violence but did show the true and real facts of the violence and torture that was there for the negro slaves. Thank you to the author, I really enjoyed reading this book