River Sing Me Home

Starred review from November 7, 2022
A woman travels the Caribbean in search of her children after she’s escaped from slavery in Shearer’s lyrical and deeply evocative debut. In 1834 Barbados, Rachel, 40, listens as her sugarcane plantation owner announces slavery has ended but that all the workers are legally bound to the plantation for another six years as apprentices (“six years of cutting and planting and cutting again. Freedom was just another name for the life they had always lived,” Shearer writes). Rachel runs away, desperate to learn the fate of her five surviving children who were sold into slavery. Former tobacco harvesters living on an abandoned plantation help Rachel to Bridgetown, where she is reunited with her mute daughter, Mary Grace. The two travel with a seaman named Nobody and an Akawaio Indian orphan named Nuno, chasing leads on her son Micah in the aftermath of an uprising in British Guiana. Tension mounts with a canoe trip up a crocodile-infested river, which leads them to her son Thomas Augustus and an encampment of runaway slaves. In Trinidad, Rachel finds her daughter Cherry Jane, a radiant beauty with upper-class pretensions and an invented identity as “the daughter of prominent free mulattoes.” Rachel finds her last surviving child, Mercy, pregnant and being whipped on a Trinidad plantation. In scenes of vivid horror, stirring resilience, and moving reconciliation, Shearer shows the cruel effects of slavery and its aftermath. The beautifully written depiction of a mother longing for her children makes this transcendent. Agent: Laurie Robertson, Peters Fraser and Dunlop Literary Agency.

Starred review from June 10, 2024

Shearer's propulsive debut begins in Barbados, just as slavery was outlawed in the British colonies in 1834. Rather than gaining true freedom, however, enslaved people immediately became "apprentices" and were required to work in the same conditions for six additional years. Rachel has been a field hand all of her life and watched helplessly as her children were taken from her to be sold. Unwilling to endure more, she runs away, intent on discovering what happened to her children. Her quest takes her to Bridgetown, where she finds her daughter Mary Grace, and then to Demerara in British Guiana and Trinidad. Overcoming fear and hardship, she pursues her lost children, finding love, loss, and a place to begin anew. Narrator Debra Michaels employs a Caribbean lilt to convey Shearer's story, which is filled with pieces of her own family history. Michaels emotionally portrays the struggles of enslaved people searching for their children and recognizing that freedom comes in many forms. VERDICT Highly recommended, particularly for listeners interested in postcolonial Caribbean history, the enduring ties of family, and the aftermath of slavery.--Joanna M. Burkhardt

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