This book has been on my shelf for eight years. Feeling a craving for some adventure, I pulled it down anxiously. It’s always strange to meet an original after having experienced an imitation. In this case, reading the book after having seen the movie. You go into it with characters already sketched in your mind; presuppositions are full to overflowing.

So I was shocked to find that the story is quite different than what I had thought. Several central characters were completely unknown to me, not having made any appearance in the movie. In fact, a majority of the book was entirely new and unexpected. What a treat! Even of the characters that I knew, or thought I knew, not one of them went the path of the movie. Not one was portrayed exactly. This led to quite a few surprises.

This is first and foremost an adventure story. It’s pace is fast. It doesn’t go into a lot of scenic detail or emotional diversion, even when I wanted it to. And though it isn’t (and shouldn’t be) realistic, I did appreciate the realness of the ending. Rather than being tied up in a pretty bow, as in the movie, where the Count walks away arm and arm with Mercedes, having gained a son, with no second thought to what he’s done. Because in reality, things can’t be undone. There is pain that doesn’t disappear. Not all can be made right here. Vengeance doesn’t deliver what it promises. So I love the lament of the Count:

Tell the angel who is going to watch over you, Morrel, to pray for a man who, like Satan, believed for one moment he was the equal of God, but who now acknowledges in all Christian humility that in God alone is supreme power and infinite wisdom. Her prayers will perhaps soothe the remorse in the depths of his heart.

And yet….not all is loss and sorrow. The resounding cry of the book is one of expectation: Wait and hope!

These books are so good. The months leading up to Christmas were hard months. They were heavy. In fact, 2016 brought a lot of trial to my family. I was flying home early in December from a trip that was heartbreaking, and I was emotionally spent, though at a point of stepping into the light at the end of the tunnel. The Kitchen House sat on my lap. I had intended to begin it on my flight home, as I rarely find myself with hours of quiet solitude. But as I read the first two pages I had to put it down. Rawness my heavy heart couldn’t handle. I wasn’t capable of going where the story was leading me. I came home, began adjusting to a renewed normal, and pulled this book out again. I’m so glad I did.

Being about slavery at the start of the 1800s it is no light read. Things happen, as they did, that made my stomach turn. I could feel the burn of hatred, the despair of being trapped, the panic and anxiety, the unwavering hope and calm resolve to endure. The first book follows Lavinia, a small Irish girl whose parents die on her journey to America, where she then finds herself as a slave on a cotton farm. The African slaves become her family. She belongs and she doesn’t, because her skin takes her where they can’t go, to Philadelphia. The second book, Glory Over Everything, picks up the story of one of the characters from the first book twenty years later. I was drawn by the story, a love for the characters, and couldn’t get to the end fast enough. When it was over, I had to spend some time working through the things I read, because I so desperately want to see the world in black and white, people in black and white, all good or all bad, and it’s simply not possible.