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Book Summary and Reviews of Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Wench

A Novel

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

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  • Published:
  • Jan 2010, 304 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

wench \'wench\ n. from Middle English "wenchel," 1 a: a girl, maid, young woman; a female child.

Tawawa House in many respects is like any other American resort before the Civil War. Situated in Ohio, this idyllic retreat is particularly nice in the summer when the Southern humidity is too much to bear. The main building, with its luxurious finishes, is loftier than the white cottages that flank it, but then again, the smaller structures are better positioned to catch any breeze that may come off the pond. And they provide more privacy, which best suits the needs of the Southern white men who vacation there every summer with their black, enslaved mistresses. It's their open secret.

Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet are regulars at Tawawa House. They have become friends over the years as they reunite and share developments in their own lives and on their respective plantations. They don't bother too much with questions of freedom, though the resort is situated in free territory – but when truth-telling Mawu comes to the resort and starts talking of running away, things change.

To run is to leave behind everything these women value most – friends and families still down South – and for some it also means escaping from the emotional and psychological bonds that bind them to their masters. When a fire on the resort sets off a string of tragedies, the women of Tawawa House soon learn that triumph and dehumanization are inseparable and that love exists even in the most inhuman, brutal of circumstances – all while they are bearing witness to the end of an era.

An engaging, page-turning, and wholly original novel, Wench explores, with an unflinching eye, the moral complexities of slavery.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Heart-wrenching, intriguing, original and suspenseful, this novel showcases Perkins-Valdez’s ability to bring the unfortunate past to life." - Publishers Weekly

"A striking debut...compelling and unsentimental." - Kirkus Reviews

"Starred Review. Readers of historical fiction centering on Southern women's stories like Lalita Tademy's Cane River ... will be moved by the skillful portrayal of Lizzie's precarious situation and the tragic stories of her fellow slaves." - Library Journal

"A striking story of heart and mind, Wench, captures time and delivers it to us. A superb and outstanding achievement." - Jeffrey Lent, author of In the Fall & A Peculiar Grace

"With Wench, Dolen Perkins-Valdez establishes herself as a remarkable storyteller. Through unforgettable characters and luscious prose, the past is able to breathe and live on these pages. Perkins-Valdez establishes herself as a powerful new voice in fiction." - Tayari Jones, author of Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling

"A finely wrought story that explores the emotional lives of four slave women caught in the web of the peculiar institution." - Lalita Tademy, author of Cane River and Red River

"This elegantly-structured novel, Dolen Perkins-Valdez presents an engrossing subject, shedding much-needed light on the racial intricacies of America's past." - Margaret Cezair-Thompson, author of The Pirate's Daughter

This information about Wench was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

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The exclamation that says it all!
All I cried at the novel's conclusion was, "Why does this have to end!"..

Amanda N.

Great historical fiction on a dark period in American History
Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet, three enslaved African-American mistresses who are regularly brought to a resort called the Tawawa House prior to the Civil War, contemplate running for freedom after a fire sets off a series of tragedies.

I'm a sucker for historical fiction, so this book was a pleasure to read, indeed. Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet are all house slaves, which sets them apart from all the field slaves or their plantations and isolates them from both the white and black populations. There's so much to think about in this story: the impending Civil War and the state of slavery in the 1850s, the strange relationships of white masters and their black slaves, the status of these couples' children, and the very fact that a place like Tawawa House actually existed. For those of you who have already read and enjoyed this one, try out Copper Sun by Sharon Draper.

Elisabeth

Average writing but intriguing subject
This is a genre that I particularly enjoy, so I had high hopes for Wench. I thought it was solid literary fiction, but nothing exceptional, albeit an intriguing topic. The character development was flat as I had difficulty sorting out the slave women and masters until the focus shifted to one particular slave/master relationship. The book ended very abruptly. As a matter of fact, it seemed like Perkins-Valdez couldn't figure out how to end it and thus took a wimpy way out. If you would like to read a book of this ilk, I would highly recommend The Kitchen House. Wench is not bad, it's just not that good.

Diva

Couldn't keep from frowning
This was not at all the novel I expected it to be. I thought that the novel was poorly written and that the characters were not at all introduced correctly. I felt that the book was at best "poor" to say the least. The book was scatterbrained and it left me upset that I had taken my time to read it, as that is time I will never be able to get back. Horribly disappointed.

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Author Information

Dolen Perkins-Valdez Author Biography

Photo: Norman E. Jones

Dolen Perkins-Valdez is a graduate of Harvard and a former University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Wench; her fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, StoryQuarterly, StorySouth, and elsewhere. In 2011, she was a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for fiction. She was also awarded the First Novelist Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Dolen received a DC Commission on the Arts Grant for her second novel Balm.

Dolen is the current Chair of the Board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. On behalf of the foundation, she has visited nearly every public high school in the District of Columbia to talk about the importance of reading and writing. She ...

... Full Biography
Link to Dolen Perkins-Valdez's Website

Name Pronunciation
Dolen Perkins-Valdez: VAL-dez

Other books by Dolen Perkins-Valdez at BookBrowse
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