Reviews for House Girl

Tara Conklin didn’t always think of herself as a novelist. Sure, as a kid she always kept a journal and was, as she puts it, “scribbling stories.” And as a corporate attorney living in New York City, she loved her job in part because it included so much writing. But she wasn’t a writer.

“I was still writing just as a hobby,” she says. “It was my dirty little secret—I was a closet writer.”

Conklin spoke with BookPage from her home in Seattle. On the day we spoke, she was busily packing her young family for a trip to London, where her husband is from. Even so, the gracious Conklin spoke passionately about The House Girl, the luminous debut novel she has been writing on and off for several years.

After she started early drafts of the book, Conklin wasn’t quite sure what would become of it.

“I didn’t think I was writing a novel,” she says. “It was just another story but it kept getting longer and longer. There were many times I set it aside. I had two young kids. I didn’t have time to be spending on this pie-in-the-sky dream of writing a novel.”

But she couldn’t get Josephine Bell out of her head—she even had dreams about the character. A teenage house slave on a Virginia tobacco farm, Josephine dreams of freedom and plots an escape to Philadelphia, away from the cruel master who permanently hobbled one slave who tried to run away by slicing his heels.

The House Girl intertwines Josephine’s story with that of Lina Sparrow, a modern-day attorney who is helping with a lawsuit seeking reparations for slavery. Her work leads her to Josephine, who may have been the real artist behind paintings attributed to her mistress.

Conklin's novel toggles between centuries and characters who are searching for love and meaning in their lives.

As Lina dives deeper into her research, she struggles not only to find out what happened to Josephine but also to convey the breadth of slavery’s intergenerational impact—the “nature of the harm,” in lawyer-speak. And Lina has some mysteries in her own past she needs to confront, too, like what happened when her mother disappeared so many years ago.

Conklin played with the story for several years, but it was only after she quit her job in Big Law and moved to Seattle that she decided to commit to being a writer.

“I was sort of done with big cities, and we wanted to think of a good place to live with kids and where I could write,” she says. “It was definitely touch and go for awhile. People thought we were crazy.”

As she got deeper into The House Girl, it wasn’t lost on Conklin that another young white woman—Kathryn Stockett—was getting some pretty significant pushback for writing about black women in 1960s Mississippi in The Help. That was part of the reason Conklin chose to write in the third person and not try to accurately capture the diction of a 19th-century slave.

“When I was writing this, first of all, I never thought anyone would read it. I was just interested in the person,” she says. “Josephine is a character with universal human experience—she is someone who wanted all the same things we all want: freedom and love and meaning in her life.”

At this point, Conklin loses her train of thought and can’t pluck the word she wants off the tip of her tongue.

“Can you tell my baby is teething and I didn’t get much sleep last night?” she laughs.

Though Conklin concedes that writing while parenting can be a challenge, “It’s one of the few careers that really lends itself well to being a parent. It’s not like you have to be in an office. I’m very unprecious about my writing time and space. I can pull the laptop out and write for 20 minutes while the kids play. I can write in a moving car. We have a very strict bedtime of 8 p.m. and then I sit down and write everything I thought about that day.”

The House Girl is the rare novel that seamlessly toggles between centuries and characters and remains consistently gripping throughout. It would appear that thoroughly modern Lina—self-sufficient, unattached—is everything the women in her research are not. But Lina feels a kinship when she reads a letter from a Virginia woman whose family helped slaves escape and run north, a woman who has realized she only wants a simple life full of love and kindness.

“Lina closed the biography. For a moment, Dorothea was present with her in the office, layered in skirts and petticoats, with her convictions and resolve, talking to Lina. Is it too much to wish for such a life? Is it too little? Lina laughed with tears in her eyes because the words written 150 years ago by a young woman she would never meet seemed truer than anything she’d read in her textbooks, anything she’d been told by her law professors. . . .”

Conklin’s debut novel is a quiet book; she never sends Lina breathlessly chasing down leads, and Josephine suffers her heartbreak not with The Color Purple-esque monologues but with unending dignity. But it is that very quietness that makes The House Girl so powerful.

Lina Sparrow, the daughter of two moderately successful artists, is a New York attorney. In 2004, she is assigned the career-making job of discovering a living person with American-slave ancestry for a class-action suit seeking reparations for abuse and bondage. Josephine Bell, a 17-year-old house slave in antebellum Virginia in 1852, tends her mistress Lu Anne Bell, a mediocre artist, and dreams of freedom. Conklin switches between the two women's viewpoints as she slowly reveals the identity of the painter responsible for poignant works representing the people, free and enslaved, of Bell Creek Plantation. VERDICT Simultaneously telling the stories of two women separated in time by 150 years, the author slowly builds a suspenseful and dramatic revelation of their deep connection across the decades. Conklin's debut is a seamless juxtaposition of past and present, of the lives of two women, and of the redemptive nature of art and the search for truth and justice. Guaranteed to keep readers up long past their bedtimes. [See Prepub Alert, 8/9/12.]--Jane Henriksen Baird, Anchorage P.L., AK

Lawyer-turned-writer Conklin debuts with a braided novel of two intersecting tales separated by 150 years. In 2004, Lina Sparrow is a first-year associate at a prestigious New York law firm; in 1852, Josephine Bell is the titular "house girl," a slave on a Virginia farm. Assigned to work on a class-action suit involving slavery reparations, Lina searches out a suitable plaintiff for the case, hoping to find a descendant of slaves with an especially compelling story. Lina's father, an artist, suggests that Lina research the story of Josephine, speculated to be the real artist behind paintings attributed to Lu Anne Bell, her white master, and Lina embarks on a search that finds her retracing the footsteps of a runaway slave. The tragedy of Josephine leads Lina deeper into not only Josephine's history but her own, which helps her to make sense of her mother, a woman Lina never knew. Alternating between Lina and Josephine, this novel is unfortunately trite, predictable, and insensitive at its core: the lives of a 19th-century black slave and a 21st-century white lawyer are not simply comparable but mutually revealing, fodder for healing. Striving for affecting revelations, Conklin manages nothing more than unsatisfying platitudes and smugly pat realizations. Agent: Michelle Brower, Folio Literary Management. (Feb.)

Lawyer-turned-writer Conklin debuts with a braided novel of two intersecting tales separated by 150 years. In 2004, Lina Sparrow is a first-year associate at a prestigious New York law firm; in 1852, Josephine Bell is the titular "house girl," a slave on a Virginia farm. Assigned to work on a class-action suit involving slavery reparations, Lina searches out a suitable plaintiff for the case, hoping to find a descendant of slaves with an especially compelling story. Lina's father, an artist, suggests that Lina research the story of Josephine, speculated to be the real artist behind paintings attributed to Lu Anne Bell, her white master, and Lina embarks on a search that finds her retracing the footsteps of a runaway slave. The tragedy of Josephine leads Lina deeper into not only Josephine's history but her own, which helps her to make sense of her mother, a woman Lina never knew. Alternating between Lina and Josephine, this novel is unfortunately trite, predictable, and insensitive at its core: the lives of a 19th-century black slave and a 21st-century white lawyer are not simply comparable but mutually revealing, fodder for healing. Striving for affecting revelations, Conklin manages nothing more than unsatisfying platitudes and smugly pat realizations. Agent: Michelle Brower, Folio Literary Management. (Feb.)