The Invention of Wings

The Invention of Wings

This story kept me up past midnight. I’m not a night person, so that should tell you how good it was. I’m sure I had heard of the Grimke sisters and Denmark Vesey before reading this book, but if you had asked me who they were, and what they did, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. One of the reasons I love historical fiction is that it gets real people and events on my radar in a way that reading history by itself doesn't. I always want to learn more after reading a good historical novel.

The novel begins in Charleston, South Carolina in 1803. Sarah Grimke, who is eleven-years old at the time, narrates half of the story. Her large family owns a number of slaves, but due to a traumatic scene she witnessed as a child, she abhors slavery and wants nothing to do with it. The other part of this story is narrated by Handful, who was given to Sarah as her slave on her 11th birthday. It seems that most stories concerning slaves focus on plantation life, so it was interesting to read what life was like for slaves in town. That being said, the horrors of slavery were not a revelation. If it had only been Handful’s narrative, this novel would have been just OK. It is Sarah’s story, juxtaposed against Handful’s, that makes this book such a fantastic read.

Kidd’s writing is energetic and fluid. She moves the story along at a brisk pace and as the narrative goes back and forth between Handful and Sarah, the stories intertwine so well that you never feel like you’re losing the thread of one in favor of the other.

Sarah Grimke was a powerfully inspiring character. She was a woman with a lot going against her – she wanted learning and knowledge and to become a lawyer, only to have her dreams squashed by her conservative patriarchal family. She wasn’t beautiful. She struggled with an embarrassing speech impediment and with public speaking. Her sister, Angelina, who became her partner in the abolition and women’s rights cause, was dynamic, fearless, and supposedly beautiful, but she seemed less interesting because of it. I guess that is why Kidd chose to tell Sarah’s story, rather than Angelina’s. Isn’t it curious that the characters we find the most fascinating in novels are the ones who seem the least remarkable in real life?