Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Crown/Archetype, 2016
Pages: 336
Rating: Do Not Recommend
Synopsis: When Sarah Brown, daughter of abolitionist John Brown, realizes that her artistic talents may be able to help save the lives of slaves fleeing north, she becomes one of the Underground Railroad’s leading mapmakers, taking her cues from the slave code quilts and hiding her maps within her paintings. She boldly embraces this calling after being told the shocking news that she can’t bear children, but as the country steers toward bloody civil war, Sarah faces difficult sacrifices that could put all she loves in peril.Eden, a modern woman desperate to conceive a child with her husband, moves to an old house in the suburbs and discovers a porcelain head hidden in the root cellar—the remains of an Underground Railroad doll with an extraordinary past of secret messages, danger and deliverance.
Ingeniously plotted to a riveting end, Sarah and Eden’s woven lives connect the past to the present, forcing each of them to define courage, family, love, and legacy in a new way.
Review: I really struggled with a rating for this book. It's not terrible and a total waste of time, I just think it misses the mark in several ways.
- This toyed with my heart strings, and not always in a good way.
- At times the transition from past to present, or vice versa, was abrupt and emotionally jarring.
- Eden was unlikeable for 3/4 of the book and then, inexplicably, underwent a major transformation unexplained by the author. Eden 2.0 was a product of convenience and felt "false."
Overall, I just felt let down by the whole experience.
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