Publishers Weekly
01/24/2022
The resilience of family and the importance of memory loom large in this emotionally satisfying tale from Williams (The Secret Women) , inspired by the life of an African woman who lived to be 112. Maryam Priscilla Grace never forgets her home in Edo after she’s kidnapped at 10, in 1769, and taken across the ocean. Before the ship can off-load its captives in Savannah, the pirate Caesar seizes it and frees all those onboard. Caesar brings Maryam to his home off the coast of Florida, where she remains with his family for five years and learns the practice of midwifery. Then, after a British vessel captures Caesar’s ship when Maryam is with him on a raid, she’s sold to a Virginia plantation owner. She works primarily as a midwife, but is forced out to the fields whenever she’s not tending a patient. Maryam meets James, enslaved on a neighboring farm, and the two marry in 1781 and raise two sons, though James and the boys are later sold to pay off a debt, setting in motion a series of harrowing changes in her life over which she has little control. Facing heartbreaking compromises as she starts a new family, and life-threatening dangers while helping runaways, Maryam nevertheless doesn’t give up on recreating her lost family. Throughout, Williams offers vivid descriptions and sticks to the historical timeline without making the narrative feel didactic. It’s a remarkable character portrait. Agent: Matt Bailer, Sanford J. Greenburger Assoc. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
Ancient, blind Maryam Priscilla Grace is one of the tenacious survivors of the ugly practice of slavery. . . . Williams’s lively plotting takes her heroine from the Caribbean lair of a group of Black pirates to the fields of Virginia’s plantation country. Maryam will succeed in having a family, although not as she imagined it. Above all, she will break free of her chains, both ‘the iron kind and the kind that wrapped themselves around your thoughts.’ ” — New York Times Book Review
“Momma Grace’s story is often a brutal one, but it’s full of adventure and romance, courage and resilience. It’s no apologia for slavery but a moving portrait of its fully human victims.” — Kirkus Reviews
Emotionally satisfying...Williams offers vivid descriptions. A remarkable character portrait. — Publishers Weekly
Maryam’s story is one of tenacity and resistance, through actions both everyday and extraordinary, and her struggle for survival is inspiring. Readers who enjoy Lalita Tademy will be drawn into this vividly imagined novel. — Booklist
“This is a truly character-driven novel that explores how people define themselves, the creation of family and home, and the importance of memory and language. . . . Fans of historical epics won’t be able to put this book down.” — Historical Novel Society
“This is one of those novels that, once you’re used to the storytelling, makes your surroundings melt away. Start it, and Things Past Telling will be a book well-read.” — Bookworm Sez
“This big-hearted, authentic portrayal of both friendship among middle-aged women and the mother-daughter bond will appeal to fans of Terry McMillan.” — Booklist on The Secret Women
“The Secret Women is . . . a moving examination of the complexities of motherhood and the strength of female friendship." — Kirkus Reviews
Booklist
Maryam’s story is one of tenacity and resistance, through actions both everyday and extraordinary, and her struggle for survival is inspiring. Readers who enjoy Lalita Tademy will be drawn into this vividly imagined novel.
Booklist on The Secret Women
This big-hearted, authentic portrayal of both friendship among middle-aged women and the mother-daughter bond will appeal to fans of Terry McMillan.
Booklist
Maryam’s story is one of tenacity and resistance, through actions both everyday and extraordinary, and her struggle for survival is inspiring. Readers who enjoy Lalita Tademy will be drawn into this vividly imagined novel.
Library Journal
10/01/2021
At the heart of this epic is Maryam Prescilla Grace—a.k.a Momma Grace, though she alone knows her birth name—who was born in West Africa in the mid-1700s, captured at age 11, and after the Atlantic crossing enslaved by numerous owners. Having learned midwifery from a Caribbean-born wise woman whose skills blended the practices of African, Indigenous, and European women, Mama Grace lives in delicate balance as she provides her service to both her owners and her community, and she endures, breathtakingly, for more than 100 years. Williams was inspired by the story of a 112-year-old woman she discovered in an 1870 U.S. Federal census report for Ohio and also draws on her own real-life ancestors. With a 50,000-copy first printing.
Kirkus Reviews
2022-01-26
Freed from slavery, an indomitable woman narrates her century of life.
This sweeping novel begins with its narrator, Momma Grace, living in Ohio with her family five years after the end of the Civil War. She’s a formerly enslaved woman, at least a century old, and she has a remarkable story to tell. She begins at the beginning, with her golden childhood in West Africa, an idyll cut short when slave traders kidnap the girl called Little Bird and one of her older sisters. Williams skillfully gives the reader a child’s-eye view of the confusion and cruelty of being marched for days to be loaded onto a ship for the Middle Passage. But Little Bird’s life soon takes another surprising turn, one that will be largely good luck for her. The ship is raided by a pirate crew led by a formerly enslaved captain called Caesar, and he quickly notices Little Bird’s facility for languages. Renamed Maryam, she becomes his translator and spy, and also, on a remote island where his crew's families live, she becomes apprentice to a midwife and healer. That luck doesn’t hold; after a few years she ends up in the slave markets and begins a long life of bondage. The skills she learned on Caesar’s island make her particularly valuable—when she’s sent to deliver babies, White and Black, and to treat the sick, it’s the slave master who collects the pay for her services. As she is sold from one plantation to another, she forms warm friendships and romances, even marrying once (although it’s illegal for the enslaved to marry). She has several children and, one way or another, loses most of them—some of them sold away by her enslavers, who see their slaves’ children as commodities. Momma Grace’s story is often a brutal one, but it’s full of adventure and romance, courage and resilience. It’s no apologia for slavery but a moving portrait of its fully human victims.
A woman tells of her long, rich life and the terrible impact upon her of slavery.
