A review by emjay24
The Healing by Jonathan Odell

Did not finish book.

2.0

This was the October selection for my office book club. It’s historical fiction, and told from the perspective of a girl who is a slave in the south. She was taken from her mom as a baby and raised by the mistress of the plantation as a kind of pet, right alongside a monkey. As the main girl gets older, she gets paid less attention, and when her master buys a healing woman for his plantation, she is apprenticed to her, against her will. She wants to be in the big house. This book is about the girl, and the rest of the slaves, coming to terms with themselves as people rather than things. The whole thing is a story told by the girl when she’s old to another girl. I got about ¾ of the way through this book. It started out very interesting, and I wanted to read it, but somewhere along the way, listening to the healer’s teachings, I just got a little stuck. I got to that, ‘I’m kind of dreading reading this’ and then decided to give up. It’s a good book, I think by the end you just need a larger attention span to finish it through.