Kaitlyn Greenidge wowed the literary world with We Love You, Charlie Freeman; her follow-up, Libertie, shows no hints of sophomore slump. Inspired by Susan Smith McKinney Steward, New York's first Black female doctor (and the third U.S. Black woman to earn her medical degree), Greenidge alchemizes history into a gorgeously affecting story of a powerful mother, her headstrong daughter and the complex challenges they must deal with as Black women before and beyond the Civil War.
The titular Libertie is the freeborn daughter of Dr. Sampson, a woman so powerful that Libertie introduces her with a riveting opening sentence: "I saw my mother raise a man from the dead." Libertie recognizes her mother's "magic" when coffins are delivered to Brooklyn and enslaved escapees rise into freedom. At "eleven, nearly twelve," Libertie begs to help, to learn, to fulfill Mama's dream of having "a horse and carriage together, with 'Dr. Sampson and Daughter' written in gold on the side." But as Libertie matures, she recognizes that her dark skin and her mother's lighter one mean very different lives, that degrees of color are inextricably linked to both privilege and oppression. As Mama attends to more white women during Reconstruction--even as they dismiss Libertie's darker, assisting hands--Libertie's sense of betrayal solidifies into polarizing resentment.
Greenidge writes with an effortless flow, her prose enhanced with songs, chants and verses that remind readers how words have other functions beyond straightforward storytelling. As her characters grow into self-awareness, readers, too, are granted the illuminating gift of bearing witness. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon