After I did my second post on what to read with your kids for Black History Month (you can read the first installment here), I started to think about what we adults could be reading. Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings came up when I searched for historical fiction related to slavery in America.

As I started to read it, I got pulled in pretty early on, which is unusual for me – I usually have to warm up to a book, sometimes for a long time, before I really get into it.

This title has some of my favorite subjects: women, quilting and sewing, faith, and a thoughtful and complex look at race in America, in this case, through the lens of slavery in the Deep South in the first half of the 1800’s. The sewing/quilting thread was woven through the story as both a functional part of the story, but also a literary theme. The book’s treatment of the historical practice of African American women using their quilts as an autobiographical tool was particularly of interest, as storytelling is something I do with my own quilts.

The characters were complex, and all the relationships – slave/owner, family (parent/child, sibling), and romantic – were realistically portrayed as the mixed-bag, nuanced thing that human relationship is. While I enjoy reading about realistic relationships, the messiness of my own real-life relationships gets under my skin nearly every day.

As I read, I thought to myself that the protagonists in the story, the Grimké sisters, were too specific to be fictional. But if they were real, I would have heard of them, right? They changed the conversation about slavery, race, and women’s rights, and paved the way for future world changers.

Like the best historical fiction, the story makes you want to Wiki everything to find out what is true and what is fictional. Knowing her readers, Kidd has an Author’s Note at the back that clarifies truth from fiction, which was fantastic. I’m glad I read the whole book without looking anything up online, because the Author’s Note told me everything I needed to know, including resources for further reading. I look forward to reading more about the history of quilting in African and African American culture. I now have several new books on my reading wish list.

My only complaint is that the end felt a tiny bit too fantastic, which made me a little mad. The book was so good. I didn’t want it to fall apart right at the end! I simmered down about the ending after reading the Author’s Note. I was too tired to re-read the whole thing, and wasn’t able to find the part that cooled me off by skimming. I thought I read something to the effect that the author used real accounts of similar events to create the ending.

Despite the way it ended, the book was a necessary reminder of the painful wound slavery left on our country. It was creative, challenging, and thoughtful, and kept me interested from beginning to end.