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I'll confess I've been delinquent in posting, but not because I haven't been reading. When I started an educational leadership doctoral program, I feared my pleasure reading would take a hit. What I've found is (1. the required reading is engaging and (2. my power-reading gene has kicked in. I've read more books in 2020 that in the last several years.
Between now and the end of the year, I'm going to post a book review a day, starting today with one I had to wait to finish.
Lisa Wingate's The Book of Lost Friends came as a recommendation from a friend whose reading taste I know I can trust. I'd read Before We Were Yours by the same author, but this one seemed quite different. I had downloaded the book from our library website, and when I wasn't finished at the end of my fourteen days, I wasn't allowed to renew because someone else was waiting for the book. I ended up having to wait a few weeks before I could resume reading.
The story is told with two plot lines. One follows Benny Silva, a first-year English teacher in a challenging school in Augustine, Louisiana, in 1987. The other plot line focuses on Hannie Gossett, a former slave and now a sharecropper on Goswood Grove plantation in 1875.
Hannie has been separated from her mother and siblings on their way to Texas as the war is nearing an end. She ends up on something of an adventure with her former master's two daughters--one legitimate and one the daughter of his French Creole mistress--as they try to find him after he disappears. They learn about the Southwestern Christian Advocate, a newspaper circulated among Black churches after the war in which letters were published by people trying to reconnect with lost family members and friends.
Benny rents a house that was once part of the Goswood Grove plantation and discovers records in the old family home that inspire her to involve her students in an oral history project. Her early frustrations and her genuine desire to do the best for her students is almost painful at first. The conflicts she encounters from the local cities and the school administration when the project looks like it is getting off the ground is all too believable.
Wingate tells a story that is both painful and hopeful. Her characters are layered and interesting. Readers may learn about unfamiliar aspects of history along the way.
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