I often have trouble writing reviews for books that are quiet and/or internally-focused. The Revisioners is definitely a quiet one: literary, but with a small speculative element; atmospheric and spooky; about motherhood and grandmotherhood and inheritance; about race and power and violence; asking questions about what freedom looks like and feels like and how one knows when one has it. But what happens in it? I'm not sure I can describe the plot.
I can say that as I finished the last page I was crying. And I can say that it recalled the lessons I learned reading Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, like that one can resist coercion without fully escaping it, that momentary escape is still escape, that a resistance hidden from the oppressor is still resistance. Which is high praise.
- kjoannerixon