Book No. 42 of 2021
Libertie is a book full of the bittersweetness of mother-daughter love, and of the dreams and ambitions that parents have for their children. It’s also a story of the journey of knowing and finding one’s self, and how that journey can be complicated and upended by racist/sexist/classist rules and expectations.
While Libertie is not as bleak or dark of a book as some of my recent reads, I personally had a hard-ish time with the “using an ill-advised hasty marriage to escape a painful reckoning and then getting trapped in the sphere of domesticity with an unsympathetic family of strangers” storyline because that kind of thing just gives me severe anxiety.
Similar Reads
A lot of the themes, particularly the estranged mother-daughter relationship, reminded me of multiple Amy Tan novels.
The theme of healing in the barely-freed Black community reminded me of Conjure Women by Afia Atakora.