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River Sing Me Home
A Historical Fiction Novel by Eleanor Shearer
Subgenres:
- Caribbean Historical Fiction,
- Slavery & Emancipation,
- Motherhood
This book is for you if you're into...
- Post-emancipation Caribbean journeys driven by fierce maternal love
- Stories where freedom is complicated and survival means risking everything
- Historical fiction centering Black women's resilience and hope
From Little Stack
Barbados, August 1834. Slavery has been abolished. But what does freedom really mean for those forced to toil in the plantations? Rachel is finding emancipation feels hollow and feels like her old life but with new chains. All she wants is to leave the plantation and find the children who were taken from her and scattered to far-off places. So, she runs.
We follow Rachel on a journey across land and sea in search of not only her children, but the liberty she’s been promised. Strong and formidable, Rachel is a natural and fierce mother who mothers those she didn’t give birth to whilst searching for those she did. She manages to avoid bitterness despite all of the trauma she endured and became a real symbol of hope and inspiration to me whilst reading.
This beautiful, page-turning and redemptive story of a mother's gripping journey across the Caribbean to find her stolen children and piece her family back together is a "celebration of motherhood and female resilience" (The Observer).
Her search begins with an ending. The master of the Providence plantation in Barbados gathers his slaves and announces the king has decreed an end to slavery. As of the following day, the Emancipation Act of 1834 will come into effect. The cries of joy fall silent when he announces that they are no longer his slaves; they are now his apprentices. No one can leave. They must work for him for another six years. Freedom is just another name for the life they have always lived.
So Rachel runs. Away from Providence, she begins a desperate search to find her children—the five who survived birth and were sold. Are any of them still alive? Rachel has to know. The grueling, dangerous journey takes her from Barbados then, by river, deep into the forest of British Guiana and finally across the sea to Trinidad. She is driven on by the certainty that a mother cannot be truly free without knowing what has become of her children, even if the answer is more than she can bear.
These are the stories of Mary Grace, Micah, Thomas Augustus, Cherry Jane and Mercy. But above all this is the story of Rachel and the extraordinary lengths to which a mother will go to find her children...and her freedom.
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