The Price of a Child - Softcover

Cary, Lorene

3.67

518 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679421068 ISBN 13: 9780679421061

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1995

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In 1855, Ginnie, an escaped slave, struggles to remain free and build a new life for herself, while agonizing over her separation from her child and working for the abolitionist cause. By the author of Black Ice. 30,000 first printing. $30,000 ad/promo. Tour.

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Review:

"The Price of a Child is a book seared by a sense of mission ... But there is nothing preachy about [Cary's] narrative style. She is a powerful storyteller, frankly sensual, mortally funny, gifted with an ear for the pounce and ragged inconsequentiality of real speech and an eye for the shifts and subterfuges by which ordinary people get by. With The Price of a Child, Lorene Cary has produced a generous, sardonic, full-blooded work of fiction."

-- Fernanda Eberstadt, The New York Times Book Review

"Cary's exacting sensual description does more than lend credibility to her portrait of the age. It imparts to her writing an undercurrent of searching perception, and a fastidious element of psychological complexity." -- David Barber, Boston Globe

"A profoundly moving, evocative work that puts a fully realized human face on the issue of slavery and its consequences. Cary's passionate, intelligent prose and her assured command of historical events as they sweep across individual lives recall Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. The Price of a Child marks the emergence of a powerful voice in American fiction."

-- Paula L. Woods, Philadelphia Inquirer

From the Hardcover edition.

From the Back Cover:

With her first book, the extraordinary Black Ice, Lorene Cary won comparisons with Maya Angelou and Richard Wright. Now she gives us a historical novel that belongs alongside the true slave narratives that are its inspiration - a gripping and minutely realized story of the antebellum Underground Railroad and of one courageous woman who rode it to freedom. In 1855 Ginnie Pryor, once cook, mistress, and slave to a Virginia planter, walks away from her furious master and into the embrace of a delegation of Philadelphia's Vigilance Committee. With freedom comes a new name (Mercer Gray), new pleasures (membership in a boisterous family of free-born blacks), and new responsibilities as Mercer becomes a speaker on the abolition circuit. But United States law still considers her a white man's property. And her baby Bennie remains a hostage in Virginia, subject to all the cruelties that Mercer has escaped. Suspenseful, raucously funny, and pulsing with the life of a vanished black America, The Price of a Child is an intimate epic of bondage and liberty by a writer with a true voice and heroic powers of imaginative reconstruction.

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