Sue Monk Kidd - The Invention of Wings Summary

The Invention of Wings: Sue Monk Kidd - A Complete Summary



The Invention of Wings is a novel written by Sue Monk Kidd. It is about a girl named Hetty (nicknamed “Handful”) Grimke and her troubled life as a slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, where Hetty is desperately waiting for a better life than the one she lives now. 

Kidd’s novel begins on Sarah Grimke’s eleventh birthday. She received Hetty, a ten-year-old girl, as a gift, to be her handmaid. The novel follows Hetty’s life over the course of thirty five years, including her longing for freedom and her destiny, which is very often filled with estrangement, guilt and sorrow.  

Maybe the best thing about this novel is that the author used a real, historical person, Sarah Grimke, when writing this novel. Kidd did a fine job of combining real-life events with fictional events, which were written in order to make everything even more interesting.  

The Invention of Wings is very exquisitely written novel, a novel where storytelling is everything. Because in this book, we read not just about the lives of two girls (women later), but we also read about a darkness in American history, the female struggle for freedom and liberation, something that will leave no reader unmoved.  

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