No matter that they love her when she heals their ills but hate and fear her when she fails. No matter how often she feels inadequate to the task. It’s Rue’s responsibility and duty as the healer to take care of her people and keep them healthy and safe, just as her mother did before her. Rue is a character that readers are compelled to follow, as she is a mass of contradictions and insecurities doing her best to survive and even thrive in a world that has declared that she is less than nothing. In the end, Conjure Women is a compelling, complicated and frequently uncomfortable book. But in the end it all does flow together, as coherent and as disjointed as memory. Sometimes those transitions are a bit jarring, and it can take the reader a bit to figure out how the story got to the place it suddenly is. ![]() Rather, the times are linked by events and memories, and lead forward and backward and in the middle again as Rue’s thoughts travel from childhood to tragedy to hope to heartbreak to childhood until the ending – which wraps its way obliquely around to the beginning – and to Bean. But we don’t experience her life in order. The story slips a bit back and forth in time as we follow Rue from her childhood in slaverytime to her adolescence in wartime and eventually her heartbreaking experiences in freedomtime. And isn’t that generally the way of things? But, it begins with the boy, Bean, and ends with him, too. Because in Rue’s attempts to save what she can, she very nearly destroys what she loves most.Įscape Rating A: Conjure Women is Rue’s story, Rue and her mother Miss May Belle are the conjure women of the title. But of making a life that is more than mere survival. Of living through adversity, heartbreak and even despair. A contingency with a life measured in months.Īnd yet, in spite of everything that hangs over Rue’s life, this is a story of living. Her dad is killed at the owner’s whim for a crime he did not commit, because the white girl who is both Rue’s friend and her enemy carelessly mentions his name when her father is looking for someone to blame for her out-of-wedlock pregnancy.Įven after the war, when she and her people are not merely free but temporarily ignored by the whites that surround their tiny, self-sufficient village, she knows that their freedom and prosperity is contingent on whites not stumbling over them. She can be sold at any time – and very nearly is. Everything Rue has, everything she does, is conditional – and she knows it. But there is plenty of that fear and it shadows the whole story. Through the entire story Rue is one who stands tall – even when she is bowed down by trauma, grief or fear. The story of Conjure Women is the story of Miss Rue, born in slavery to the healing woman – or conjure woman – Miss May Belle and her man, a slave on the next plantation over. Magnificently written, brilliantly researched, richly imagined, Conjure Women moves back and forth in time to tell the haunting story of Rue, Varina, and May Belle, their passions and friendships, and the lengths they will go to save themselves and those they love. ![]() The secrets and bonds among these women and their community come to a head at the beginning of a war and at the birth of an accursed child, who sets the townspeople alight with fear and a spreading superstition that threatens their newly won, tenuous freedom. Spanning eras and generations, it tells of the lives of three unforgettable women: Miss May Belle, a wise healing woman her precocious and observant daughter Rue, who is reluctant to follow in her mother's footsteps as a midwife and their master's daughter Varina. Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Ī mother and daughter with a shared talent for healing-and for the conjuring of curses-are at the heart of this dazzling first novelĬonjure Women is a sweeping story that brings the world of the South before and after the Civil War vividly to life. Published by Random House on April 7, 2020 ![]() Genres: historical fiction, magical realism Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
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