Finding Our Wings: The Invention of Wings
Last night I completed my latest read, a book that I'd been hearing about for months - The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd , author of The Secret Life of Bees . This was a good read - a great one even. The Invention of Wings tells the story of Sarah Grimke, the daughter of Southern slaveowners in early nineteenth-century Charleston, South Carolina and Hetty, a.k.a. Handful, a slave girl owned by the Grimke family. On her eleventh birthday, Sarah receives a special gift from her parents - her very own slave girl. That girl is Handful. This story follows both women as they come of age in the early 1800's, as they share the sense of powerlessness they both feel as women, and for Handful, as an African American slave woman. We dip into the valley-lows with the women as they experience loss, betrayal, rejection, and paralyzing fear. But we also follow them to their mountain-highs as they embrace purpose, friendship, love and courage. We witness them finding their voic...