The House Girl: A Novel

This is Tara Conklin's debut novel, though I find it reads more as that of a seasoned author.Two women from very different times are the protagonists. Josephine is the house girl of the title, which is a nice way of saying that she is a slave who works in the house. She is close with the mistress of the house, who is very ill. Lina's story unfolds in present time, where she is an up-and-coming attorney. She is assigned to work on a case involving slave reparations.Josephine's story is far more compelling than that of Lina's, which makes sense. Josephine's life is never her own. It doesn't matter whether or not she has feelings about anything or if she's tired or if she has an injury. The work is there and she must do it. She must take anything that is thrown at her without complaint. I can't even begin to imagine what it was like to live that life, but I think Conklin is able to paint a realistic picture.Lina lives with her father, a famous artist. Her mother was killed in an accident when Lina was a toddler. Lina is her job. She doesn't have room for anything in her life that doesn't involve making partner by the time she's thirty.Lina's story can't match up to Josephine's, of course. It's kind of like how the Academy awards the actress who allows herself to be made into the ugly duckling. The swan cannot compete with that (fine, unless you are the Black Swan, no pun intended.)I was glad to read more about the case for and against slave reparations. First of all, I can't imagine viewing another person as property. I don't view my cat as property. But, I am not sure that reparations should be paid. Don't get me wrong - I realize that so much of America was built on the backs of slaves. However, there is no one alive today who owned slaves or who was a slave. I know for a fact that my family never owned slaves - though at the time that part of the family lived in Maryland and Kentucky, they were poor.In doing some further reading, apparently only 1/4 of Southern whites owned slaves. And surprisingly enough, there were slaves in the Northern states at one time, too.While I wish that the practice of slavery had never existed, it was interesting to read that the culture from which the slaves came also kept slaves. Not to mention, there's also indentured servitude - so many people came to America as indentured servants and were often not released after the cost had been repaid. And let's not forget the Native Americans, many of whom were enslaved when the Europeans arrived. (I'm not forgetting what the Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis, just trying to keep this discussion to the American history.)If there are reparations to be paid, well, probably everyone is owed something.Some interesting tidbits from the books:* "What about the whole idea that there is no loss?" Garrison said. "If you look at the numbers, the African American population of the U.S. is in a far better economic position today than if they'd stayed in Africa. You could easily argue that the transatlantic slave trade brought them to this country, which then gave their descendants the opportunity to take advantage of America's economic success. I mean, isn't any wrong done back then negated by the objectively better position we find ourselves in today, as compared to the people who stayed in Africa."* Africans themselves kept slaves, Garrison said, it was part of the culture. Chieftains of one tribe gladly handed over prisoners from an enemy tribe to the European traders. And what about no retroactive application of law - did a more firmly rooted legal principle even exist? You couldn't penalize someone for doing something that was legal at the time they did it. That's arbitrariness at its worst. That's what Stalin did.* Truth was multilayered, shifting; it was different for everyone, each personal history carved unique from the same weighty block of time and flesh.I really enjoyed the book. I made note of the sources Conklin used and look forward to reading some of them.Highly recommend.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, ironically for some of the reasons others did not. I read several reviews that critiqued Conklin's use of lengthy detail of "unsubstantial" things. I found Conklin's lengthy detail smart. For example, during a scene she may digress to describe a particular piece of furniture, only to further relate this piece of furniture to a flashback of one of the main characters, giving her readers a broader sense of the characters and how they came to be.Conklin also did an excellent job giving readers just enough new information each chapter to end each chapter wanting to know more. Conklin achieved this suspense in her dual narration by beginning the novel with a conflict on both ends. For Josephine, the 17-year-old house slave whose narration begins in 1852 Virginia, Conklin's readers learn immediately that Josephine has been slapped by her master and feels a strong urge to run. Chapter 2 jumps to a 2004 young lawyer, Lina, who lives with her "widowed" father who seems to harbor a secret about her mother Grace's death. While it seemed insignificant at first, by the end of the novel the reader can see why Conklin chose to begin Lina's story with her trashing a brief only to quickly begin a new reparations case that eventually links to Josephine. In much the same way, the reparations case is put on hold, leaving all of Lina's time-sensitive work described throughout the novel as futile.While the two stories of Lina and Josephine obviously connect, I appreciate how Conklin uses the knowledge Lina gleans from researching Josephine to change Lina's character for the better. In the beginning, we see Lina as a hardworking lawyer, who is recently single and still living with her estranged father. Additionally, she struggles to face the reality of her mother's supposed death, avoiding the situation altogether with her time-consuming workload. However, it's her workload and what she learns of Josephine's life and determination to run that ultimately inspires Lina to leave the dissatisfying law firm for which she works, move out of her father's house, pursue her love interest with (of course) one of Josephine's descendants, and finally seek the truth about her mother.If it wasn't for roughly a 40-50 page letter near the end of the novel written by Caleb Harper, the man who helped Josephine escape Bell Creek, I would have easily given The House Girl a 5-star rating. Unfortunately, of all the perspectives and voices portrayed in this novel, I found Caleb's the least entertaining, leaving me desperate to return to Lina's and Josephine's narration. At the letter's conclusion, there were only 20 short pages left in the novel, leaving me a bit dissatisfied with the amount of time Conklin devoted to Caleb.Overall, I would recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys dual narration, dynamic characters, and a story of a runaway slave and a modern-day lawyer that comes full circle.

Josephine Bell is a Virginia house slave who is determined to escape. She tried once before, but her very advanced pregnancy forced her to return to her master’s home. What happened to her child becomes the subject of another story, as 21st century attorney Lina Sparrow is searching for Josephine’s descendants. Lina has been tasked with finding a plaintiff for a slavery reparations lawsuit that her firm is pursuing, and she has discovered that Josephine probably produced artwork that has long been attributed to her mistress. Lina also begins to realize that perhaps her father is withholding information about Lina’s mother, who supposedly died in a car accident when Lina was a toddler. The narrative alternates between Lina’s story and Josephine’s story, and I felt that the author crammed too many jagged side plots into this novel and that she should have focused a little more on the characters. I suppose that the art angle is what ties Lina to Josephine in the first place, as Lina’s father is also an artist. Josephine certainly deserves posthumous reparations, not only for having been enslaved and abused but also for not having received credit for her paintings. However, there seems to be a lot of drama in Lina’s life as well, not only related to her mother’s fate, but also related to her career and work relationships. I was particularly curious as to why the author threw in the intrigue about Lina’s mother, unless there was supposed to be some parallel between Lina’s mother and Josephine, neither of whom was able to be a part of her child’s upbringing. I enjoyed reading this book, despite finding the characters to be a little flat and the plot a little too busy.

Tara Conklin's debut novel is the story of two very different women, separated among other things by a century and a half. Josephine is the slave to Lu-Anne Bell ('Missus Lu') and her husband Robert ('Mister'), living on a plantation in Virginia in the 1850s. She has an exceptional talent for painting, which Missus Lu allows her to exercise when she's in her more benign moods, either creating original work or finishing off Missus Lu's own poor paintings. But life on the whole is unhappy on the plantation, and Josephine dreams of escape to the free North. When Missus Lu is diagnosed with cancer, Josephine determines that rather than be left with Mister - who has raped her in the past and left her pregnant with a child she believes has died - she will try to escape. Josephine's story alternates with that of Lina Sparrow, a young corporate lawyer who ends up working on a class-action suit involving slavery reparations. By an extraordinary chance (and some tips from her father, who is a professional painter) Lina ends up researching Josephine's story - for rumours have circulated for some time that Josephine was the painter of a series of art works attributed to Lu Anne Bell, now doing rather well in galleries. At the same time Lina tries to find out more about her own mysterious mother Grace, an artist who died when Lina was a child, and whose life her father is now commemorating in a major exhibition. And - of course! - there's a prospect of love, which ties neatly into the Josephine research...I felt I should have liked this novel: the information on slavery is interesting, I'm often keen on books that explore the lives of artists and parent-child relationships, and some of the writing (as regards individual sections and paragraphs, such as about Josephine's life on the plantation and Oscar's art exhibition) is good. But I have to confess I found the book very boring and rambling.For one thing, Josephine never came alive as a person for me. It doesn't help that she disappears from the story as a narrator about halfway through, and we only learn about her final months via a letter from someone else. We never get any idea of how she learnt to paint so well (it's very rare indeed that people can just 'do' something naturally with no training at all) and Conklin's writing about her art is pretty trite on the whole - just a lot of musings about 'I must paint this' or 'I love painting'. The epistolatory bits of the book, primarily letters from abolitionists (and an alcoholic doctor) to their families) meanwhile felt forced and very dry - essentially a way for Conklin to 'information-dump' and show how much research she'd done. The whole thing felt an exercise in box-ticking rather than a serious consideration of what it might be like to be a slave. The writing is also repetitive - how many times does Josephine have to 're-hash' her first failed escape, for example, or observe how ill Missus Lu looks?The modern story was equally unsatisfying. I rather liked the relationship between Lina and her father Oscar, but this somewhat fizzled out by the later sections. Lina was an odd and rather superficial character - I couldn't work out why on earth she'd gone in for corporate law if she didn't enjoy it and preferred human rights work (it wasn't as though she was so poor she could only cope on a huge salary), it seemed odd she'd showed no real curiosity in her mother until her mid-twenties or researched her life properly, and her relationship with handsome young musician Jasper (and her vague flirtations with the men in the law office) felt sketchy and unbelievable. Conklin clearly knows the legal world (she started off as a corporate lawyer herself) but she doesn't do anything really interesting with her knowledge, and this part of the story just ends up as a rather bland moral tale about how Josephine's example taught Lina she didn't really want to be Part of the Wicked Corporate World (without really showing how this happened).Conklin also tries to tell far too many stories - Josephine's relationship with Missus Lu, Josephine's escape, Josephine's vocation as an artist, the story of the family who try to help her escape and the doctor who discovers her, Lina's discovery (a pretty unlikely one!) of what happened to her mother, Lina's romance with Jasper, Lina's difficult career choices, Lina's difficulty in accepting a potential stepmother, the legal case, office politics.. and as a result all of them feel a bit scrappy and unfinished. The whole sub-plot about Lina's mother Grace feels particularly ill-worked into the main plot.I came to the conclusion that Conklin has plenty of interesting ideas, but was ultimately more interested in showing what a sensitive, historically aware writer she was, how much research she'd one and how her story could be used to a good moral purpose than in her characters. I'm afraid I agree with the American reviewer who called the book 'trite'. Still - the fact that for the first couple of chapters I thought I'd found a great new writer might encourage me to try her second novel, which at a glance appears to have had better reviews.

I just couldn't get into it, considering it was such a controversial issue. I didn't feel much soul in the story. I've read a lot about slavery so perhaps I expected richer characters, language and powerful imagery.

I really enjoyed this book, and it was well written. The characters are believable and the story shows some of the tragic events that were encountered in the middle of the last century.

A fascinating story involving flash backs into the past and an intimate insight into the life on slave plantations. The portrayal of that life and relationships between owners and their slaves is particularly well drawn. Of consuming interest is that between the House girl and her Mistress which is very well written showing a great deal of feeling and colour. This contrasts well with the modern life and relationships between the heroine and her employers.

Very good. Story. I loved the way the story linked backwards and forwards. A really gripping read. Not read this author before, but I will look out for her again.