I thought this was a good book. It was four stories that created one story of a families struggle through slavery. On one side you learn about the plight of the slave woman, her cross to bear, to have children not born from love but from slavery and rape, to yearn for freedom and hope for and the stories of other slaves that these women interacted with. Then you have the story of the slave owners family, unlike most southern families these owners are Jews, themselves persecuted and enslaved now owning slaves. The religious fight between is it right or wrong, to own, to bed, to mistreat. The premise of this story is very good but there is a lot of filler, the read like thoughts of the characters of the book but it could have been something that was weened a bit. There were a few plot twist which made up for it but getting to those twist was a slow journey. This was on the level of The Help and Wench...good idea but the voice of the characters were lost in translation, coming from a perspective that the author could not grasp. It would have been better if he had focused on the slave owners and male slaves.