![]() ![]() But it loses its dimensionality and reverberation. Conklin's two-track novel is, at times, beguiling, thought-provoking and propulsive. And there are passages of resonant beauty (Brooklyn glimmering on a cold night), flashes of wit (the grand rhetoric versus the cutthroat absurdities of the practice of law), heart-wrenching torment (the lives of slaves), electrifying suspense (Josephine's plight) and heroism (the courage of those who run the Underground Railroad). The book's historically rooted and socially explosive themes are perfectly suited for an incisive novel about the psychological and societal tolls of racism and sexism, America's incalculably vast and formally unacknowledged debt to African-Americans, and the links among art, self and survival. Controversy is reaching a boiling point as art historians argue that Bell's strongest works were actually created by her house girl, Josephine.Ĭonklin, a former corporate lawyer, has come up with intriguing, resounding and affecting material. ![]() How convenient it is when Oscar immediately presents her with an invitation to an exhibition of paintings by the celebrated, nineteenth-century Southern woman painter Lu Anne Bell. Lina must find a suitably representative plaintiff, someone with a traceable and certifiable lineage reaching back to an ancestor who was enslaved. ![]() The catalyst is Lina's assignment to an unusual, potentially historic, most likely merely opportunistic case involving reparations for the descendants of slaves. ![]()
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