Sarah overcomes a stammer, society's expectations and her mother's cruelty to find an outlet for her passion for justice among the Quakers.
But Sarah's viciously vindictive mother rips the contract in two, and Sarah and Handful are linked for life. Repulsed by the idea of owning a fellow human being, Sarah draws up a contract to free Handful. The real Sarah Grimké had a slave named Hetty, but details of her short life are scant. When Sarah turns 11, her mother gives her 10-year-old Hetty, better known as Handful, to be her waiting maid. Kidd weaves her potent novel from the real story and writings of abolitionist Sarah Grimké, who grew up on a plantation in Charleston, S.C., and with her sister, Angelina, fought to end slavery and champion the rights of women. The Invention of Wings isn’t Kidd’s strongest work, but it’s an absorbing, illuminating and enjoyable read.Sue Monk Kidd's The Invention of Wings - the new pick of Oprah's Book Club 2.0 - tells a searing and soaring story of two women bound together as mistress and slave. Most excruciating are the descriptions of the various punishments inflicted on the slaves, from frequent cane whippings and a gruesomely creative one-legged punishment to the treacherously hard labor at the city workhouse. The disregard for familial relationships is painfully clear when marriage and death in the Grimke family lead to the redistribution and sale of the slaves’ children and siblings. The inhumane working conditions are illustrated by Handful’s pithy observation while beating washed bedsheets on a rail to dry: “The rail in the stable was forbidden ’cause the horses had eyes too precious for lye. But Kidd writes beautifully, and the book shines in illuminating the daily humiliations and abuse of slavery. The book’s characters tend toward caricatures, and its plotlines are mostly unsurprising. The next morning, she finds it at her bedroom door, torn in two. When presented with her own slave on her birthday, the precocious Sarah - who fancies a future as a jurist - consults her father’s library and draws up a manumission document. Kidd imagines Grimke as having witnessed a slave flogging at age 4 - an event so traumatic that it left her with a mostly lifelong stutter. The new novel is based on the life of the real Sarah Grimke, a 19th-century abolitionist from an affluent plantation-owning family in North Carolina. Sue Monk Kidd - whose debut novel, The Secret Life of Bees, became a best-seller in 2002 and was the basis of a 2008 movie - again explores an usual relationship between black and white female characters. They are the stars and alternating narrators of The Invention of Wings. Meet Sarah: 11 years old, a voracious reader and Handful’s unwitting owner. Meet Handful: 10 years old, a sewing prodigy and a slave.
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