Title: River Sing Me Home

Author: Eleanor Shearer

Genre: Historical Fiction

Publisher: Headline

Publication Date: 19th January 2023

Rating: 5/5

Cover:

Summary:

We whisper the names of the ones we love like the words of a song. That was the taste of freedom to us, those names on our lips.

Mary Grace, Micah, Thomas Augustus, Cherry Jane and Mercy.

These are the names of her children. The five who survived, only to be sold to other plantations. The faces Rachel cannot forget.

It’s 1834, and the law says her people are now free. But for Rachel freedom means finding her children, even if the truth is more than she can bear.

With fear snapping at her heels, Rachel keeps moving. From sunrise to sunset, through the cane fields of Barbados to the forests of British Guiana and on to Trinidad, to the dangerous river and the open sea.

Only once she knows their stories can she rest. Only then can she finally find home.

Inspired by the women who, in the aftermath of slavery, went in search of their lost children.

Review:

It’s pretty clear from the premise of River Sing Me Home that it is going to be an incredibly emotional and heartbreaking read – and it it is. However there is also a real beauty and tenderness that gives a sense of hope in even the darkest of situations. The story follows Rachel, who, after the legal end of slavery in the British Empire, goes in search of her lost children. The difficult and heart wrenching journey takes her across a great distance as she desperately tries to understand what has happened to her children but also to try and find some kind of peace and closure within herself after years of unthinkable trauma.

River Sing Me Home is set in a particularly complex moment in history, so full of brutality and pain, and yet supposedly at a time of newly realised ‘freedom’. What freedom really means and how women like Rachel had to try to find their way through the ripples of tragedy and darkness that accompanied the aftermath of slavery is a huge part of what this incredibly special book is about. Rachel is the heart and soul of River Sing Me Home and I was completely behind her from beginning to end. This is a lyrical, gripping and powerful gut punch of a novel that is written with sensitivity and strength. I highly recommend it and think this will be one of the books of the year.

✶✶✶✶✶

Thank you so much to Anne Cater of Random Things Blog Tours for inviting me on this tour and organising it. I kindly received a copy of the book from the publisher. My review is entirely my own honest opinion.

Buy the book:

Waterstones | Blackwell’s | Amazon