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The kitchen house / Kathleen Grissom.

by Grissom, Kathleen.

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Atria Paperback, 2020.

Indentured servants -- Fiction.

Plantation life -- Southern States -- Fiction.

Race relations -- Fiction.

Racially mixed people -- Fiction.

Slaves -- Fiction.

United States -- History -- 1783-1815 -- Fiction.

Virginia -- Fiction.

9781439153666 (trade pbk.)

1st Touchstone trade pbk. ed.

368 p. ; 21 cm.

Previously published in 2010 by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Includes a reading group guide, conversation with the author, and preview of Glory over everything, companion to The kitchen house.

Lavinia, an orphaned seven-year-old white indentured servant, arrives in 1791 to work in the kitchen house at Tall Oaks, a Tidewater, Va., tobacco plantation owned by Capt. James Pyke. Belle, the captain’s illegitimate half-white daughter who runs the kitchen house, shares narration duties, and the two distinctly different voices chronicle a troublesome 20 years: Lavinia becomes close to the slaves working the kitchen house , but she can’t fully fit in because of her race. At 17, she marries Marshall, the captain’s brutish son turned inept plantation master, and as Lavinia ingratiates herself into the family and the big house, racial tensions boil over into lynching, rape, arson, and murder.

Historical fiction.

Canadian fiction.

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