Book Review - The Kitchen House

Yesterday, I finished The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom.   Set around the turn of the nineteenth century on a Virginia tobacco plantation, the story focuses on a family and their slaves.  There is much mixing of race in both the master family and the slaves' families because 2 generations of white men "use" the black women for their pleasure and get them pregnant repeatedly.

The main character is Lavinia.  At about age 6 or 7, she was orphaned while her family was coming to America from Ireland.  Both of her parents died on board the ship and were buried at sea.  She and her brother were split up and sold as indentured servants.  Lavinia was purchased by the ship's captain who happens to be the master of the plantation.  He brings her home and puts her in the kitchen house for the slaves to raise, so she learns to love the slaves as her family.  Lavinia narrates much of the story.

There is a second narrator named Belle.  Belle is the captain's daughter by a slave woman.  She is light skinned enough to pass for white, but she is kept as a slave.  She ends up being the main caretaker of Lavinia, and they become very close.  Belle mainly works in the kitchen house cooking for the master family. Belle and Lavinia narrate alternating chapters where they comment on some of the same events from different points of view,  but for the first 3/4 of the book, Lavinia's chapters are much longer than Belle's.

The story covers about 20 years of time as Lavinia grows up and eventually marries the captain's son and becomes the mistress of the plantation when her father-in-law dies.  There is a lot of drama in the story - secrets and relationship issues - and there is also some exciting action.  I really enjoyed the book and looked forward to my reading time to see what would happen next.