Inventing Victoria
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
In a searing historical novel, Tonya Bolden illuminates post-Reconstruction America in an intimate portrait of a determined young woman who dares to seize the opportunity of a lifetime.
As a young black woman in 1880s Savannah, Essie's dreams are very much at odds with her reality. Ashamed of her beginnings, but unwilling to accept the path currently available to her, Essie is trapped between the life she has and the life she wants.
Until she meets a lady named Dorcas Vashon, the richest and most cultured black woman she's ever encountered. When Dorcas makes Essie an offer she can't refuse, she becomes Victoria. Transformed by a fine wardrobe, a classic education, and the rules of etiquette, Victoria is soon welcomed in the upper echelons of black society in Washington, D. C. But when the life she desires is finally within her grasp, Victoria must decide how much of herself she is truly willing to surrender.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This captivating historical novel, set in rapidly changing post Civil War Savannah, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., traces a young African-American woman's transformation as she moves from service into high society. With evocative flashbacks and richly layered narrative, Bolden deftly sketches Essie's early years in a brothel, where she is neglected by her prostitute mother in favor of "uncles" and laudanum, and she aches "to be somebody else's child." Essie's "first rescue, first refuge" comes at 14, when sympathetic house cleaner Ma Clara helps her find a service job in a boarding house. Tension mounts when a stratospheric opportunity arises: the benevolent Dorcas Vashon, an elegant African-American patron who seeks out "young women of promise," offers to make 16-year-old Essie her companion, at which point Essie renames herself Victoria. Bolden (Crossing Ebenezer Creek) offers a compelling, complex look at the African-American social elite as Victoria receives a rigorous education in how to be a lady after launching into D.C. society amid such luminaries as Frederick Douglass. Though romance beckons, the true star here is Victoria herself. Ages 13 up.
