Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The reviews I read prior to picking this up were great and, as a fan of historical fiction, I thought I was getting ready to read a real winner. I usually enjoy stories of the south and enjoy southern writers of all types so I was eager to get started. Set on a tobacco plantation right after the Revolutionary War, the main character is a young Irish girl (age 7) who's parents died on the Atlantic crossing. She becomes the slave/servant of the plantation owner and lives among the slaves but has one of the higher positions in the kitchen house. The slave stories and the stories of the plantation family are interwoven throughout the novel and much about life during that time period is explored. I know I am going against the popular opinion on this one, but I didn't like it at all. I often read books that are less than cheerful such as novels about the Holocaust, so I don't have a dislike of "downer" books, but this one was just too much. Every page is filled with one tragedy after the next. Rape, incest, beatings, mental illness, physical and mental abuse fill page after page after page. I know life as a slave had to be horrible and want to be clear that my expectation was not happy, grateful slaves, but the constant tragedies in the family of the master went on and on as well. If something awful could happen in this family, it did. I found myself hating to pick the book up and actually felt out-of-sorts emotionally when not reading - the negativity just bled over into my everyday life. The novel felt like a soap opera jam packed with disaster after disaster. I also had some difficulty with the writing and there were believability issues so those aspects didn't save the novel for me either. I wanted to like it; hoped to like it; and tried to like it (I really did). This one wasn't my cup of tea.