Libertie (On Sale March 30th) is a riveting novel named for the main protagonist, the daughter of a pioneering Black woman doctor (based on a real historical figure) in Kings County aka Brooklyn in the 1800s. Libertie wants to shape her own life instead of following in her mother's footsteps for a variety of reasons and is not really that interested in becoming a doctor. Her mother is a pioneer who is sort of trapped in her own kind of box; she is trying to free people through nurturing them, but in this, she seems to trap Libertie into her own ambitions for her daughter’s life.
Libertie has a wise child’s view of her mother’s life and wants to chart another path. (In case you missed it, this profile of Greenidge in the New York Times provides a lot of good context for Libertie’s quest for being, basically, ordinary) Part of how she does this is going off to college, where she meets The Graces -- a pair of beautiful singers, Louisa and Experience, who enter the narrative like a pair of fairies with attitude. They are the first in the novel to note that everything in Libertie’s existence, including how she seems to think about her future and her present, is based on her appraisal or reaction to her mother. This is when Libertie begins to stop responding in quite the same way to her mother’s letters and she gradually becomes more of her complex self.
Her love interest is the alluring, Peter Pan-like Emmanuel Chase, who is trying in his own way to build a kind of freedom in the hulking, dark shadow of his father, Bishop Chase who has molested many of the girl children where they live, including his own daughters TiMe and Ella. Emmanuel’s sisters are sufficiently creepy and haunting.
There is so much to love here - luscious language and description, a kind of love story that is enchanting, the depth of characterization that Greenidge provides when showcasing the tensions that can spring up and fester among mothers and daughters, especially. I particularly like some of the descriptions of Haiti, and then, there is a point where these descriptions veer a bit into a zone that is not really stereotype so much as it feels like it adds another layer to Libertie's complex position and decisions in the world kind of late in the book (like, at the end) that is hard to connect to the larger narrative arc. It is still worth reading for its scope, its ambition and its contribution to recovering dynamic, lost histories of us.
Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge
I just placed a hold on this at the library! Thanks for the lovely review.