Pale

“The summer of 1966 burned hot across America but nowhere hotter than the cotton fields of Mississippi. Finding herself in a precarious position as a black woman living alone, Bernice accepts her brother Floyd’s invitation to join him as a servant to a white family, and so she enters the web of hostility and deception that is the Kern household.

The secrets of the house are plentiful but the silence that has encompassed it for so many years breaks with the arrival of the harvest and the appearance of Jesse and Fletcher at the plantation as cotton pickers. The brothers, sons of house servant Silva, awaken a vengeful seed within the Missus of the house as she plots to punish not only her husband but also Silva’s family.

Pale is such a wonderfully written book. From the wonderful, well-rounded characters to the very descriptive setting and story, I could not help but feel as if I were in the story itself. And although the plot may be slow-paced on occasion, I felt as if the pace did a great job of showing the tension in the air, either thin as ice or thick as fog.

While many of the historical fiction books that I have read in the past pertain to World War II, with Pale taking place in an era that I have not read much about, I could not help but enjoy the journey that the book brought me on, and in a way, I couldn’t help but feel like I learned something new about an era of American History that is often overlooked.”