shai631 's review for:

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Hugo Martínez, Rebecca Hall

4.0

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I received this book as part of a book club and found it so engrossing that I read it in about 2 hours. It is a graphic novel and incorporates the author, Rebecca Hall’s, struggle to find some documentation that supports her hypothesis- that enslaved females led revolts. The book is filled with intriguing images by the illustrator, Hugo Martínez, who captures the emotional plight of both the slaves and a descendant. We see the turmoil the men and women went through in being transported to the Western Hemisphere while also bearing witness to the grief and frustration experienced by Ms. Hall as she finds that many of these women’s voices has been silenced by the white historians who documented the slavery era.

I will reread this book more slowly to take in the wealth of information presented. On the surface, it seems like a story about a woman looking for a story about women who were enslaved. However there are many layers to this novel- there are lessons about biases in historical records, connections between these events and how the world around us operates now, and even just rereading to take a closer look at the images presented to us by Hugo Martinez. I appreciate this book and look forward to passing it on to others in my circle of readers.