Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm afraid I'm going to break from the pack here and only give "The House Girl" by Tara Conklin, a two-star review. The novel is comprised of two interwoven narratives, one takes place in modern day concerning Lina, a young attorney who is looking for a plaintiff who is a descendent of a slave to participate in a huge slavery reparations case. The other story is of Josephine, a young slave who disappears from the records in 1852. Josephine's story revolves around one day, the day she decides to run for freedom. I felt this story dragged and had too many holes in it that Lina would magically come to fill. Josephine's story did have moments of suspense about whether or not she would be caught trying to escape. Lina's story moves quicker and is full of coincidences that propel her to find out about Josephine. I found myself not liking Lina as a character. I don't need to like a character to like a novel, but Lina annoyed me. Her passivity about her own life irked me; there are secrets that she knows are being kept from her about her mother, but she doesn't press to find out about them. The feasibility of a billion to trillion dollar slavery reparations case is only nominally questioned and then presented as a moral imperative. Only a few of the many legitimate arguments against such as class-action case are presented in a brief discussion and then utterly discounted. Additionally I found it unbelievable and irritating that Conklin would make it seem that finding a person who could prove they were descendent from slaves with a credible story of harm, to be such a haphazard, needle-in-the-haystack situation. Surely there are millions who could fit that bill. I concede that as a former lawyer, Tara Conklin has much more legal knowledge than I, but the architecture of the case, and thus the plot of the novel, just didn't ring true to me on any level. By the time I got to Caleb's story of Josephine at the end I just wanted it all to be tied up, only to find that his narrative dragged and wandered excruciatingly only to then end each of their stories in a rushed and cut short fashion, which was astounding after the rest of the book dragged. In short, the book just did not grab me; I did not look forward to reading it and I was glad to finish and move on to something else. Obviously other readers had a more positive experience; this review reflects my experience and opinion only. For a wonderfully engrossing, moving and gut-wrenching story of slavery I recommend Toni Morrison's, "Beloved".