by Lisa Wingate
2 alternating stories from different timer periods -2 young women, 1875 Reconstruction South and Texas and small town Louisiana 1987
intertwined
Wingate narrates this moving story in two strands pulled from the same ball of yarn.
Hannie Gossett’s strand, coarse and scratchy, pulls from deep inside the thick ball. Set during the wild, complex days of Reconstruction in 1875, Hannie’s journey shows her kindness to one who mistreated her and her steady resolve to find her lost loved ones. More than a century later, Benny Silva arrives on the same scene and enacts a similar tale.
The strand pulled from the outside of the ball is Benny Silva’s story from 1987. Wingate intertwines the tales, unraveling the ball until the end when its apparent that the narrative is all one strand, separated by a century but rooted in the same sacred and scarred ground of the old Gossett plantation in Augustine, Louisiana.
Hannie moves from enslaved person to sharecropper, then on as rescuer of the pampered daughter, Missy, of plantation owner William Gossett. As seeker of her lost loved ones, Hannie follows the trail of the 3 blue necklace beads – she find help in “River Rat Gus” and a disreputable Irishman who “told it true” and pointed her to where her Mama could be found.
2020, NY: Ballantine Books
Susan Olmstead Wang 