THROWBACK THURSDAY - CANE RIVER

Throwback Thursday is a bookish meme hosted by Jenny over at Take Me Away. 

It's pretty straight forward, you highlight an oldie but a goodie!

My pick for this week is: 

Cane River by Lalita Tademy

This book was a gift to me a million years ago, and I absolutely LOOOVED it.  It was the first book I had read about the life of slaves, and it really impacted me in a major way.  The parts that were especially haunting were when slave women had their babies taken away and then sold.  Families were torn apart, and probably would never see eachother again.  Here is the blurb from the back cover which can say it better than I ever could.

On a Creole plantation on the banks of Louisiana's Cane River, four generations of astonishing women battle injustice to unite their family and forge success on their own terms.  They are women whose lives begin in slavery, who weather the Civil War, and who grapple with the contradictions of emancipation through the turbulent early years of the twentieth century.  There is Elisabeth, who bears both a proud legacy and the yoke of bondage.... her youngest daughter, Suzette, who is the first to discover the promis --- and heartbreak of freedom... Suzette's strong-willed daughter Philomene, who uses a determination born of tragedy to reunite her family and gain unheard-of economic independance... and Emily, Philomene's spirited daughter, who fights to secure her children's just due and preserve their dignity and future.

After reading this years ago, I found I was fascinated with this time period and the personal lives of those who were treated like animals, and found another book years later The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill, very good as well. You can read my review of it here.  Now I am looking forward to reading Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, and it is sure to become a hot one in the book blogging world.