![]() But as Libertie grows up, Greenidge masterfully details the way the girl begins to separate herself from her mother and find her own path. As a child, Libertie marvels at her mother’s diligence, stoicism and mystifying ability to heal. ![]() The novel begins just before the war in a free Black community in Brooklyn, a borough that’s still mostly farmland. Kathy Sampson and the titular narrator Libertie, whose incredible story is shaped by her own choices as well as other people’s designs. ![]() In Libertie, they’re transformed into Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward, the first woman in New York to earn a medical degree, and by one of her children, a daughter who moved to Haiti upon her marriage. Greenidge’s second novel (after 2016’s We Love You, Charlie Freeman) was inspired by the life of Dr. With its revelatory history and fresh perspectives, Kaitlyn Greenidge’s splendid Libertie is a welcome addition to the canon. ![]() But with the exception of books like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, only recently have novels about enslaved or freeborn Black people during the war and Reconstruction become prominent. ![]() There’s plenty of Civil War fiction out there it’s a seemingly bottomless category of novels exploring people both prominent and obscure whose lives are touched in some way by the war. ![]()
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