Sweet Hope

by Mary Bucci Bush

Overview

Italians as indentured labourers in Southern cotton plantations at the turn of the 20th century? Entire families scrabbling to survive, dying of malaria, building relationships with their neighbours, many the first generation of freed slaves? Sweet Hope unleashes the little known story of Italians who came looking for a better life in La Terra Nuova and found hardship, misery and their own form of slavery instead

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781550713428
Publisher:	Guernica Editions Inc
Publication date:	10/28/2011
Series:	Prose series , #91
Edition description:	None
Pages:	402
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.08(d)

About the Author

Mary Bucci Bush received her M.A. and D.A. from the graduate program in creative writing at Syracuse University, where she worked with George Elliott and Raymond Carver. Her short story collection A Place of Light was published by Guernica Editions in 2006. She lives in Pasadena, California, and teaches creative writing at California State University Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

In her thoroughly researched and engaging novel, Bush (A Place of Light) sheds light on the little known fate of Italian immigrant laborers who came to America expecting opportunity, but ended up working alongside African-Americans as indentured servants on southern cotton plantations. The story explores the dynamic exchange between the two minorities as they struggle to define a complex social hierarchy. At the sardonically named Sweet Hope plantation, Italian workers struggle under the burden of inescapable debt. However, connections begin to form. Two families become intertwined–the Italian Pascalas and the African-American Halls. As the African-American sharecroppers are expected to help the Italians assimilate, teaching them English and how to harvest cotton, Step Hall arises as the natural leader and middleman between the Italian workers and the plantation management. The Italians must find a way to survive the harrowing conditions at Sweet Hope, where they live in perpetual poverty and disease, all under the threat of a dangerous manager. The narrative deftly weaves various characters' points of view to portray the harsh realities of plantation life as well as the hopes and strengths that workers struggled to maintain in a new land. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly