Up the Creek Book Club

Reviews

• "At the end of Edward P. Jones's stunning new antebellum novel, an artist recreates the book's plantation setting as "a map of life made with every kind of life man has ever thought to represent himself." One of the characters says, "It is what God sees when He looks down." The author's viewpoint has the same effect in this book about slavery, property, freedom and family, all in a most unusual setting. With hard-won wisdom and hugely effective understatement, Mr. Jones explores the unsettling, contradiction-prone world of a Virginia slaveholder who happens to be black." (The New York Times)
  
  
• "The bizarre world of American slavery has been the subject of much fiction, some of it uncommonly good, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to William Faulkner to Toni Morrison. This extraordinary novel -- the best new work of American fiction to cross my desk in years -- takes as its subject one of the most peculiar anomalies of that endlessly provocative and troubling subject: In the antebellum South, where whites systematically enslaved blacks, there were free blacks who themselves owned black slaves." (The Washington Post)
  
  
• "On a small plantation in Manchester County, Virginia, in the eighteen-fifties, a freed black man named Henry Townsend lives with his wife and the thirty-three slaves he has bought, some with the help of his former owner. This kaleidoscopic first novel depicts daily life for Henry and his friends (“members of a free Negro class that, while not having the power of some whites, had been brought up to believe that they were rulers waiting in the wings”); for the plantation’s slaves, one of whom believes that he, too, will be transformed into an owner after Henry’s death; and for the county’s white inhabitants, who coexist uneasily with their slaves and their emancipated black neighbors. Jones has written a book of tremendous moral intricacy: no relationship here is left unaltered by the bonds of ownership, and liberty eludes most of Manchester County’s residents, not just its slaves." (The New Yorker)