Grade: A
This is chick-lit-historical-fiction at it’s best. Every turn of the page is murder, mayhem, rape, and forbidden love affairs. Everything you need to get the blood bubbling.
The Kitchen House follows two female protagonists, Lavinia, a white indentured servant from Ireland, and Belle, a beautiful half-black half-white slave. The story is written in alternating chapters, with Lavinia’s chapters being considerably longer than Belle’s.
Belle acts as Lavinia’s mother figure when she is first brought to the plantation. Lavinia is happy with her black family, but as she grows older and more beautiful, outside forces tear her from her family and thrust her into the white world she doesn’t understand and doesn’t feel connected to. Many minor characters are killed, sold, raped, and beaten throughout Lavinia’s life, breaking her heart and ours each time.
Belle, on the other hand, is hated by the master’s family because they think she is his mistress. In reality, she is his daughter. We also follow Belle’s sad story through both her and Lavinia’s eyes.
To try and sum up all the details and complexities of the relationships between the many characters would just confuse, so that’s all the summary I will attempt.
I enjoyed this book very much, compelled to stay up late nights flipping through pages with a hunger I haven’t felt in a long time. Grissom writes in a beautiful southern tone throughout the novel, and her use of detail and observations are compelling. However, I am aware that my love of this novel may be mostly because of how much action and violence is laced throughout, and my love of it feels a little cheap.
Though there are many characters in this novel, Grissom writes them in such a distinct way that the reader is always clear on who they are. I’ve often read other novels with an abundance of characters so indistinct from each other that I would get them mixed up. This never happened with The Kitchen House. The characters came alive so fully that it would be impossible to get them mixed up.
However, the majority of these complex and beautiful characters are female, as it goes with chick-lit. It is common for male characters to be flat and unforgivable, but Grissom surprises again with male characters that are as complex, if not more so, than her female characters.
Marshall, an especially complex character, does the most horrible acts to everyone around him. And yet, the reader can’t help but feel sorry for him, knowing his twisted past. We watch Marshall as he turns from innocent child to sadistic monster, and his fall from grace is even more compelling at times than Lavinia’s narrative.
One aspect of character development I was disappointed with was how pure and good Lavinia was. “With the heart of a child” as she is often described. We are the closest with her and her thoughts as the majority of the book is from her p.o.v. , yet she lacks the depth a lot of the other characters have. She is portrayed as an angel that just loves everyone. The only time we see her off her pedestal is during a drug-induced escapism she uses to get away from her miserable life- something we don’t blame her for, and a short period of time when she harbors resentment for an old friend for sleeping with her husband. Again, can’t really blame her. She even justifies her feelings to herself, acknowledging that she is angry with the girl because she can’t be angry with her husband.
Overall, a very enjoyable read.
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