The Kitchen House

Vivid and fast paced, The Kitchen House transports readers to antebellum Virginia, where the good and evil of humanity plays out in epic style on a sprawling tobacco plantation.

The story mainly focuses on the Irish orphan, Lavinia, who for much of the book exists in a no-man’s land of race and class. An indentured servant on the plantation, she lives, works, and loves the slaves whom she resides with, yet her skin color means that she can’t fully assimilate into their world. As we follow Lavinia’s story, we witness the intricacies of friendship, familial bonds, and, of course, racial prejudice.

Overall, I really liked this book and would recommend it; however, I don’t think it touched on any issues involving slavery, race, or the politics of plantation life that haven’t already been gone over in other books and movies. For the most part, the author wrote her characters into comfortable stereotypes: the steadfast black matriarch who calls almost everyone her “child,” the nutty plantation owner’s wife who goes crazy from grief and lack of society, the naïve woman turned victim wife who stupidly marries a monster and then can’t figure out how her life went so wrong, and, of course, the evil slave master and drunken, sadistic slave owner who impregnates nearly every woman who happens to be within a ten-foot radius of his unquenchable predatory ways.

Wait … now I sound like I didn’t like the book. I did. It’s just that the last third of the book was like a tragedy on steroids. While the conclusion was mostly satisfactory, I would have liked to see a little less melodrama and a lot more character development.