This Here Is Love

Perry debuts with a remarkable narrative of slavery, indentured servitude, and a Black landowner in colonial Virginia. Freeman Andrew Cabarrus has struggled against all odds to obtain farmland and build a home for his enslaved wife, Phoebe, and their five children. He has the money to free them from bondage, but plantation owner Othman Scarborough refuses unless Andrew sells him a prime piece of his property, a concession he’s unwilling to make. At another plantation, an enslaved woman named Cassie continues toiling in the tobacco fields after her young daughter Bless is forcibly removed from her care to live in the main house. As Bless comes of age, she grows increasingly defiant. Another plotline follows Rowan Dane, who made the difficult decision to lift his family out of poverty in Ireland by selling himself, his wife, and their young son, Jack, into indentured servitude. Jack grows up in Virginia resenting his father’s choices, and when a plantation owner and slaver takes him under his wing as a protégé, Jack is torn between the immorality of enslavement and his desire to do whatever is necessary to never be poor again. The principal characters are singular and unforgettable, and their responses to injustice lead to outcomes that are by turns heartbreaking and uplifting. It’s a marvelous tale about the limits of freedom. (Aug.)