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live as partners, and she believes they love each other. She has borne two of his children, who are mixed-race and considered slaves. His wife has not had any children. Over a few summers, she meets and befriends three other enslaved women of color who are also concubines of white planters. The characters explore different facets of their experiences and relationships with their masters, and the inner life of Drayle is also explored.
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68:. Among the resort's summer visitors were wealthy white Southern planters with their enslaved mistresses of color, and sometimes their mixed-race children. These interracial couples generally stayed in the cottages rather than the main hotel of the resort, which was used primarily by white visitors. She was intrigued by this little-known history.
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Lizzie, a young enslaved
African-American woman in the 1850s, is taken by her Southern white master Nathan Drayle for summers at Tawawa House in southwestern Ohio, a resort near what were also called Yellow Springs, iron-rich waters. Away from his Tennessee plantation, there she and her master can
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said the novel "raises questions about complex parts of slavery that are less explored for lack of written accounts: What kinds of accommodations and negotiations took place between slaves and masters? What passed for love? The novel looks at what history gets privileged and what gets forgotten."
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said that the debut novel seemed to progress in its sections to express a fuller account of its characters, including Lizzie's master Nathan Drayle, after a reliance on stereotypes about slavery in the opening section.
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These interracial couples and their arrangements scandalized some of the whites in the area, particularly abolitionists. The young enslaved women also see
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Perkins-Valdez said that she was inspired to write the novel after coming across a brief reference to this resort, as part of the history of
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After the resort closed in the 1850s, it was purchased as the first campus of
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for fiction. Its paperback edition, published in 2011, became a
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in the area, and some begin to imagine their own freedom.
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110:earned positive reviews. Samantha Nelson of
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460:Novels about American slavery
235:"Dolen Perkins-Valdez: Wench"
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