The Wedding Gift - Softcover

Bodden, Marlen Suyapa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1439255830 ISBN 13: 9781439255834

Publisher: Createspace, 2009

Synopsis

When wealthy plantation owner Cornelius Allen marries off his daughter Clarissa, he presents her with a wedding gift: a young slave woman called Sarah. It just so happens that Sarah is Allen's daughter as well, the product of a long-term sexual relationship with his slave Emmeline. When Clarissa's husband rejects her newborn son as illegitimate and sends Clarissa and Sarah back to the Allens, their return sets in motion a series of events that will destroy the once-powerful family. Told through the alternating view points of Sarah and Theodora Allen, Cornelius's wife, The Wedding Gift shines a glaring light on the brutal world of slavery in the antebellum American South. Marlen Suyapa Bodden's compelling historical novel explores how planters controlled slaves and free women alike, propelling them along a taut social tightrope as they struggled for freedom and autonomy in an oppressive and patriarchal world. The controversial and shocking ending is sure to leave readers aghast.

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 in New York City. She has more than two decades' experience representing poor people and low-wage and immigrant workers, many of whom are severely underpaid, if paid at all. 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. The reader may contact Marlen Bodden at: marlensuyapa@optimum.net or PO Box 906, Stamford, CT 06904, and visit her website at: marlenbodden.com for the history behind The Wedding Gift in photographs, illustrations, maps, and a bibliography.

About this edition

• Publisher: Createspace
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1439255830
• ISBN 13: 9781439255834
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 324