The Wedding Gift: A Novel

Bodden, Marlen Suyapa

ISBN 10: 1427232970 ISBN 13: 9781427232977

Publisher: Macmillan Audio, 2013

Synopsis

When Cornelius Allen gives his daughter Clarissa's hand in marriage, he presents her with a wedding gift: the young slave she grew up with, Sarah. Sarah is also Allen's daughter and Clarissa's sister, a product of his longtime relationship with his house slave, Emmeline. When Clarissa's husband suspects that their newborn son is illegitimate, Clarissa and Sarah are sent back to her parents, Cornelius and Theodora, in shame, setting in motion a series of events that will destroy this once powerful family.

Told through alternating viewpoints of Sarah and Theodora Allen, Cornelius' wife, The Wedding Gift is a stunning novel that shows where the complicated and compelling bonds and relationships between women explored in novels like The Help and The Secret Life of Bees began. Marlen Suyapa Bodden's novel is an intimate portrait of slavery and the 19th century South that shows where this particular American story and dynamic all started and will leave listeners breathless.

Includes a reading group guide read by the author

About this title

From the Author

This historical novel, based upon a court case in nineteenth-century Alabama, invites readers inside the plantation, the wealth, the family, the relationships. Two women, a house slave named Sarah Campbell and her mistress Theodora, both of the Allen plantation, narrate. Dawn Goldsmith, Internet Review of Books --Internet Review of Books

About the Author

MARLEN SUYAPA BODDEN is a lawyer at The Legal Aid Society in New York City, the nation's oldest and largest law firm for the poor. She drew on her knowledge of modern and historical slavery, human trafficking, and human rights abuses to write The Wedding Gift, her first novel. Marlen is a graduate of New York University School of Law and Tufts University. In 2012, the University of Rhode Island awarded Marlen an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

Jenna Lamia is the acclaimed narrator of Mary E. Pearson's The Adoration of Jenna Fox, which won a YALSA Amazing Audiobooks for Young Adults award, and Carol Lynch Williams's The Chosen One, for which Jenna received the 2010 solo narration (female) Audie Award. Lamia made her Broadway debut in 1988 in Ah, Wilderness, and she's also appeared off-Broadway in The Glory Of Living, directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Her other acting credits include appearances on Oz, Law & Order: SVU, The Jury, and NYPD Blue. She's also appeared in the films The Fighter, The Box, and Something's Wrong in Kansas.She attended Amherst College, New York University, and the Sorbonne in Paris.

About this edition

• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1427232970
• ISBN 13: 9781427232977
• Binding: Audio CD
• Number of pages: 9