Sue Monk Kidd's The Invention of WIngs

I believe I was flipping through a magazine when I noticed an advertisement for Sue Monk Kidd's The Invention of Wings. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Kidd she authored the book The Secret Life of Bees, which went on to become a movie starring Queen Latifah and Dakota Fanning. I felt that Kidd was successfully able to explore the kinship between a white girl with a tumultuous past and the strong black females she came in contact with throughout the course of the novel. For that reason and more I was eager to see what Kidd was able to produce in The Inventions of Wings. Maybe a week after seeing the advertisement in the magazine, I searched the public library catalog to see where the book was available. To my delight it was at a library near my home and I soon picked up the book. To answer some of the questions you might be thinking, no I do not have an e-reader and yes I still borrow actual books from the library. I am all for the technological movement but there are things I refuse to do and that includes giving up the pleasure of holding a real live book in my hands. Usually it takes me a day or two to start reading a new book but I immediately started The Invention of Wings, eager to discover the characters in the book.

To give you a little background information on The Invention of Wings, it chronicles the lives of two characters: Sarah Grimke the daughter of a judge whose family owns a plantation of slaves and Handful, the maiden slave of Sarah. The chapters, which tend to be short, rotates between the perspectives of Sarah and Handful. Readers will quickly learn of Sarah's disgust for slavery however Handful turns out to be a complicated character. At first Handful does everything that is required of a slave but as she gets older and is influenced more by her disruptive , strong-willed mother, Charlotte, her view on life changes. The relationship between the two girls is an uncommon one that will intrigue readers throughout the course of the book.

One of the basic thing I appreciated about this book and books in general are the short chapters. Although I love to read, long chapters tend to disengage me a bit and decreases my enthusiasm for reading further into a text. With short chapters the temptation to read more is frequent and I think to myself "I need read only a couple of pages more."  The rotation of perspectives from Sarah to Handful was genius. Sarah and Handful are in total opposite positions in the world and it is necessary to see how each views the world, although their viewpoints are not as far as might be presumed.

The evolution of Sarah and Handful is what makes The Invention of Wings so captivating. Through their respective experiences, Sarah and Handful both develop their voices and use their voices to navigate through the world. In the experiences of the two protagonists, Kidd depicts a vivid description of the brutality of slavery, although most are already aware of this fact. She tells a story, which is based on real life events, about finding's one value in society and following and acting upon your own belief system. Reading The Invention of Wings allowed me to put re-experience the harsh reality that was slavery and challenge me to question how I use my voice in society. Expect to be taken on an emotional ride!