Fourteen years after the end of slavery, Lord Henry Hardin and his wife, Lady Bertha, enjoy an entitled life in Union County, Arkansas. Until he faces a devastating reality: Bertha is unable to bear children. If Henry doesn’t produce an heir, the American branch of his family name will die out. So Henry, desperate to preserve his aristocratic family lineage, does the unthinkable.
When Salome, Henry’s colored mistress, gives birth to a white-skinned, blue-eyed daughter, Henry orders a reluctant Lady Bertha to claim the child as their own…allowing young Margaret to pass into the white world of privilege.
As Margaret grows older, unaware of her true parentage, devastating circumstances threaten to shroud her in pain and shame…but then, ultimately, in revelation. Despite rumors about Margaret’s true identity, Salome is determined to transform her daughter’s bitter past into her secure future while Henry goes to extraordinary lengths to protect his legacy. Spanning decades and generations, marked by tragedy and redemption, this unforgettable saga illuminates a family’s fight for their name, for survival, and for true freedom.
Other reviewers have covered the factual errors and blatantly unnecessary violence. But worst of all Although it’s being marketed as historical fiction, this book is actually the author’s family mythology, full of secretly swapped babies, American nobility (?), “coloured” mistresses, family secrets, and…I’m making it sound far more exciting than it is. The characters have exactly one note: frenetic. They scream at each other for four-hundred pages in impenetrable (and inaccurate) dialect, and when they get tired of that, there’s raping and wife beating to be done. Other reviewers…
A Daughter to Avoid The only positive thing I can manage to say about this book is that it was a free Kindle First read. Free is good, but then there is certainly the matter of one’s time. I value mine too highly, so I cheerfully abandoned this sophomoric dreck early this morning after some 120 pages of the beginning of more than 400 pages, and read the last three or four of the forty-five chapters. That was enough, surely, to decide whether this was a good, bad, or indifferent read. Bad won.Â
Just awful I seldom write negative reviews for books, but this was just awful. It isn’t well-written. The black characters were stereotypes. The women were stereotypes. It was hard to build a true empathy with the heroine because she was so poorly written. I tried to force myself to finish it, but the storyline was a fail.