Valerie Rush

Exquisitely written, this is a heart-rending partially-fictionalized retelling of the story of the Grimke sisters and their battle for freedom and dignity for both women and blacks in the 1830’s south. While the first two-thirds of this book is a painful but unsentimental rendering of the horrors of slavery, I found the last third to be a critically important account of how the abolitionist movement was riddled with racism and misogyny which the Grimke sisters battled to expose but which were never overturned when slavery itself was abolished. Important history to know if we are ever to defeat these deeply-rooted prejudices today. A must-read!