Title: The Kitchen House

Author: Kathleen Grissom

Genre: Historical Fiction

Publisher: Touchstone

Format: Paperback

Pages: 369

Rating: 5/5 stars

*Warning: mature content. Parents please be advised.*

Synopsis (Goodreads):

When a white servant girl violates the order of plantation society, she unleashes a tragedy that exposes the worst and best in the people she has come to call her family. Orphaned while onboard ship from Ireland, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives on the steps of a tobacco plantation where she is to live and work with the slaves of the kitchen house. Under the care of Belle, the master’s illegitimate daughter, Lavinia becomes deeply bonded to her adopted family, though she is set apart from them by her white skin.

Eventually, Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. Lavinia finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds. When she is forced to make a choice, loyalties are brought into question, dangerous truths are laid bare, and lives are put at risk.

Review:

This book was heartbreakingly beautiful. There was so much love and loss in this book that made you love and hate it at the same time. This is such an important book because it not only describes slavery in a fantastic and detailed way, but it also describes the lives of indentured servants. These were people that were bound to the land for a set amount of time. Often poor white families would indenture themselves in the New World to try and make a better life. They would be forced to work for a person for a set number of years, and then they were free. The Kitchen House describes this situation in a great way. Lavinia comes over to America with her Irish family, only to be orphaned on the ship and left in the hands of the captain as an indentured servant. She struggles to understand her place on the plantation, as she is not equal with the other whites she encounters, but she is above the black slaves whom she lives with, and who love and take care of her. She does not comprehend until much later the hard life that the slaves live, and the hurt and loss that they suffer. Lavinia is a naive character in that she believes that she can make everything better. She learns quickly that this is not the case, and that she cannot save everyone she loves.

Belle is another interesting character. She is a slave, even though her father is white. She works in the Kitchen House, cooking the family meals. She is a character that represents the brutality of slavery- knowing that half of your family is free, and the other half is not. She is encouraged to get her freedom papers and get away from the brutal family, but she does not want to leave her family of slaves whom she grew up with. She is a strong character that does not let every bad situation get her down, but learns to deal with the pain and loss.

I would highly recommend this book, not only because it is a gripping and fantastic read, but because it teaches us about the experiences of slaves and indentured servants, and how they struggled to survive.