River Sing Me Home

Starred review from November 7, 2022
A woman travels the Caribbean in search of her children after she’s escaped from slavery in Shearer’s lyrical and deeply evocative debut. In 1834 Barbados, Rachel, 40, listens as her sugarcane plantation owner announces slavery has ended but that all the workers are legally bound to the plantation for another six years as apprentices (“six years of cutting and planting and cutting again. Freedom was just another name for the life they had always lived,” Shearer writes). Rachel runs away, desperate to learn the fate of her five surviving children who were sold into slavery. Former tobacco harvesters living on an abandoned plantation help Rachel to Bridgetown, where she is reunited with her mute daughter, Mary Grace. The two travel with a seaman named Nobody and an Akawaio Indian orphan named Nuno, chasing leads on her son Micah in the aftermath of an uprising in British Guiana. Tension mounts with a canoe trip up a crocodile-infested river, which leads them to her son Thomas Augustus and an encampment of runaway slaves. In Trinidad, Rachel finds her daughter Cherry Jane, a radiant beauty with upper-class pretensions and an invented identity as “the daughter of prominent free mulattoes.” Rachel finds her last surviving child, Mercy, pregnant and being whipped on a Trinidad plantation. In scenes of vivid horror, stirring resilience, and moving reconciliation, Shearer shows the cruel effects of slavery and its aftermath. The beautifully written depiction of a mother longing for her children makes this transcendent. Agent: Laurie Robertson, Peters Fraser and Dunlop Literary Agency.

November 1, 2022
Emancipation does not seem different from slavery when it comes to the Providence plantation on Barbados. The workers are told they'll be apprentices for six years, unable to leave. Rachel, who had never known freedom and never had anything that was hers alone, not even her children, flees. She begins a search for her five surviving children that will take her across the Caribbean in this moving testament to a mother's love and the heartbreaking toll of families torn apart. Along the way, Rachel finds generosity among strangers, many with their own stories of escape, and celebrates the endurance of love even in the face of injustice and threats. As her travels take her from Barbados across the ocean to Demerara and Trinidad, she traces her children's journeys after they were sold away. The paths they take to find freedom, safety, and better lives reveal the struggles of a generation born into bondage. For Rachel, although her efforts to locate her children do not always succeed as she hoped, freedom is found in her search.

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January 1, 2023
A historical novel set in the Caribbean in the 1830s. One of the enduring horrors of slavery was its destruction of families by enslavers who literally tore children from their mothers and sold them away, never to be heard from again. That violation has happened not once but five times to Rachel, the book's protagonist. Born enslaved on a sugar cane plantation in Barbados, she's in the act of escaping as the book begins in 1834, running for her life with no clear goal but freedom. When she meets a formerly enslaved woman called Mama B, the older woman tells Rachel, "Me see it in your face. Your pickney. You want to find them." From that moment, finding her lost children becomes Rachel's quest. One of the women in Mama B's community remembers seeing a girl who resembled Rachel in Bridgetown several years before--just the first of many handy coincidences that form much of the plot. Sure enough, Rachel finds Mary Grace working in a dress shop when she steps in to get out of the rain--and the shop owner gives her a job, too, and turns out to have a friend who has access to slave sale records that might lead to the whereabouts of two of Rachel's sons in Guyana. It seems almost everyone she meets has some information or skill to contribute to her search--so much so it starts to strain credulity. There's also a streak of anachronism that weakens the book's sense of history. A formerly enslaved woman-turned-sex worker named Hope explains to Rachel why she does that kind of work: "I make money and that means I don't have to give myself up completely." It's a 21st-century feminist attitude that seems unlikely for a 19th-century woman, as do some of Rachel's meditations on the destruction of the environment wrought by plantation farming. The novel's flaws of plot, character, and verisimilitude are frequent enough that it doesn't achieve the inspirational power it seems to aim for. A formerly enslaved mother's search for her lost children is emotionally diluted by lack of craft.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 13, 2023

DEBUT Shearer's debut novel begins breathlessly with Rachel on the run from her Barbados plantation. The year is 1834; slavery has been abolished in the British colonies, only to be replaced with exploitative "apprenticeships"--essentially indentured servitude. Yet it's a liminal time, with a growing free population and increasing personal rights. Rachel finds an abandoned plantation managed by individuals who were formerly enslaved and from there sets out to locate the now adult children who were taken from her in enslavement. Her searches take her to Bridgetown, the largest town in Barbados, to the jungles of British Guiana, and eventually to Trinidad. The novel is in many ways an adventure story, but Shearer capably shifts the narrative from action to introspection, illuminating the inner life of this powerful matriarch. Rachel reassembles her family through sheer will, her remarkable search aided by a touch of magical realism and the islands' interconnectedness. The author is a scholar of Caribbean history and in a fascinating afterword shares how historical accounts support the accuracy of Rachel's odyssey. VERDICT Recommended, especially for readers of historical fiction and Caribbean/postcolonial history in particular, with a remarkable female character at its core.--Reba Leiding

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