Friday, November 15, 2019

THE REVISIONERS by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

Synopsis: In 1925, Josephine is the proud owner of a thriving farm. As a child, she channeled otherworldly power to free herself from slavery. Now, her new neighbor, a white woman named Charlotte, seeks her company, and an uneasy friendship grows between them. But Charlotte has also sought solace in the Ku Klux Klan, a relationship that jeopardizes Josephine's family.

Nearly one hundred years later, Josephine's descendant, Ava, is a single mother who has just lost her job. She moves in with her white grandmother Martha, a wealthy but lonely woman who pays her grandchild to be her companion. But Martha's behavior soon becomes erratic, then even threatening, and Ava must escape before her story and Josephine's converge.

The Revisioners explores the depths of women's relationships—powerful women and marginalized women, healers and survivors. It is a novel about the bonds between a mother and a child, the dangers that upend those bonds. At its core, The Revisioners ponders generational legacies, the endurance of hope, and the undying promise of freedom.

Review: You know how you finish a book and rate it right away, but then you wake up the next day after you've had time to sleep on that book and you're like, no, that book wasn't really a 5 star, it's more of a 4 star? That's me with The Revisioners.

I love the way Margaret Wilkerson Sexton travels back and forth between two different eras and two different protagonists. She did it really well in A Kind of Freedom and does it fairly well in The Revisioners, except when I woke up thinking about the story line this morning, it dawned on me that there were a number of loose ends that weren't tied up by the end of the book.

Without giving too much away, I'll say there were characters in the present and in the past who were tied to each other, that much was spelled out. But there were other characters in the present and in the past who I think may have been tied to each other (or really should have been in my opinion), but I don't know if they were or if there was just an underlying message about the kind of people you can and cannot trust.

Another thing that kind of shook me was the abrupt ending because it left a big question unanswered about one of the two protagonists. There were also unanswered questions in regards to some of the present day characters that left me scratching my proverbial head. I didn't sign up for a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Sometimes I want the story spelled out for me instead of being left to guess what happened.

Overall, The Revisioners is still a solid read, which is why I gave it four stars, I just wish the author had taken a little more time to give definitive answers instead of leaving readers to guess.






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