Sue Recommends Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Perkins-Valdez' Wench is a great title to offer to readers who enjoyed The Help by Katherine Stockett. Like The Help, it focuses on the lives, treatment, and relationships of black women, although in another time period.

With Wench we are taken back to the days of slavery and focus on the life of Lizzie who is owned by a plantation owner; she is also his sexual companion and has two children with him. He takes her to Ohio where she and three other slave women develop a bond and learn that there are "free" blacks that live there. They share stories of their lives on the plantations in the South and explore the opportunity of freedom which forces them to make a decision--do they stay in their lives as someone else's property OR run and take a chance for a new life, and in some cases, leave their children behind? SH