Sunflower Sisters
Book Feature - Sunflower Sisters by Martha Hall Kelly
HBL Note: I read Martha Hall Kelly’s Lilac Girls in 2016 with a brand new book club I’d joined shortly after moving to Chicago the first time. I read it as an e-book and hadn’t realized how long it was until the bookclub met in person and the other members had their hardcopies with them. I remember asking, is this book really that thick?! I’d flown through it. I’ve been a big fan of Martha Hall Kelly’s ever since. When her second book acme out, Lost Roses, I campaigned to get an ARC (by politely emailing her publicist.) She not only offered an ARC, I also got an advanced recording of the audiobook, which is how I ended up “reading” it. Martha Hall Kelly also agreed to an author interview at the time, and I was over the moon excited. I thought it couldn’t get better than that. Until this year, when the St. Louis County Library asked if I would interview Martha Hall Kelly in a live, virtual Q&A, which will air on Monday, April 5 at 7pm Central (click here for more information.) So, next year we get to meet in person, right Martha?! Haha.
It is my pleasure to introduce her third novel about the Woolsey-Ferriday family, Sunflower Sisters. Scroll down to read more.
Book Feature - Sunflower Sisters by Martha Hall Kelly
Book Feature - Sunflower Sisters by Martha Hall Kelly
From the publisher:
Georgeanna "Georgey" Woolsey isn't meant for the world of lavish parties and the demure attitudes of women of her stature. So when war ignites the nation, Georgey follows her passion for nursing during a time when doctors considered women on the battlefront a bother. In proving them wrong, she and her sister Eliza venture from New York to Washington, D.C., to Gettysburg and witness the unparalleled horrors of slavery as they become involved in the war effort.
In the South, Jemma is enslaved on the Peeler Plantation in Maryland, where she lives with her mother and father. Her sister, Patience, is enslaved on the plantation next door, and both live in fear of LeBaron, an abusive overseer who tracks their every move. When Jemma is sold by the cruel plantation mistress Anne-May at the same time the Union army comes through, she sees a chance to finally escape--but only by abandoning the family she loves.
Anne-May is left behind to run Peeler Plantation when her husband joins the Union army and her cherished brother enlists with the Confederates. In charge of the household, she uses the opportunity to follow her own ambitions and is drawn into a secret Southern network of spies, finally exposing herself to the fate she deserves.
Inspired by true accounts, Sunflower Sisters provides a vivid, detailed look at the Civil War experience, from the barbaric and inhumane plantations, to a war-torn New York City, to the horrors of the battlefield. It's a sweeping story of women caught in a country on the brink of collapse, in a society grappling with nationalism and unthinkable racial cruelty, a story still so relevant today.
Book Feature - Sunflower Sisters by Martha Hall Kelly
