Alicia
I was amazed and delighted to learn about Josephine Leary, a woman who achieved an incredible amount of success and self-sufficency for the time she lived in as well as for being a freed Black woman whose family was enslaved. The story that Kianna Alexander has created around this woman is full of historical detail - fashion, homewares, buggy driving lessons - due to her extensive research into the life and times of her subject.
Alexander also had access to Leary's personal papers, including some of her correspondence, legal and financial documents, as well as contemporaneous news and cultural documentation. Unfortunately, even with the support of this archival material, the book felt much more like being led on a tour of this extraordinary woman's life and very little like historical fiction. Leary and the people in her life have limited interiority, and the dialogue is stagey, often expositional or motive dumping and very rarely an examination of their experiences. A diary entry of Leary's is “quoted” early in the story, but I cannot tell if this is an actual (edited) diary entry from her personal effects or a fabrication; I lean towards the latter because of how clinical and impersonal the content is. Because we get very little understanding of who Leary is as a person, when emotional scenes do occur, everything feels like a pantomime, characters overemoting to convey a sense of stakes that have not been earned by the connection the reader tries to forge with Leary.
I can see this being an excellent high school read because of the educational and inspirational value, but the lack of character in the book was quite a disappointment for me. Perhaps this would have been better formed as a piece of non-fiction.
Perhaps my expectations for this were simply too high going in because of how well reviewed this work has been, but it just didn't capture me. Strange to feel so disconnected from my experience of this book because Finck's emotional and social and personal story resonates with my own, but something was missing in the execution for me. I'm not crazy about the art style here, either, although it is very much appropriate for the story and life it represents.
There is something very comfortable and uncomplicated about Amish romance fiction that makes these types of books easy for me to dip into as a little fluff. They also have a Midwestern kind of sensibility, something that I recognize in the people that I grew up around but who are still so alienated from my own experience of religion and community and individual spirituality. Truly the casserole of books.
Loved this! Very clever little mystery, in presentation and execution. Excellent characterization; kind of amazing to be able to do that in epistolary form with so many players! Really enjoyed the framing - having the interns reading along and not being at the same point in the text as the reader was very clever. Just so well done. Cannot wait to devour everything else Hallett gives us.
