All We Were Promised by Ashton Lattimore

 

My thoughts 

This is such a beautifully written story. Yes it's filled with lots of sadness and angst. It has a lot in it that might make you feel uncomfortable. It might even teach you something. It has all the things that I love in a good historical novel. It's emotional. Heartwarming in many ways. The way these women stood together to fight for one of them, and for each other. 

This is a story of three women who lived in Philadelphia. One was a socialite. One a run away slave. One wanting to get away from her slave owner. This is each's story. Told from each one. Of their struggles and fears for two and one trying to help as much as she can. 

Nell is from an upperclass black family and has never known any kind of hardships in her life. But she wants to help others. She wants to help end slavery and fight for what is right. 

Charlotte is a runaway slave who lives in Philadelphia with her father James. She has to pretend. She lives like she is nothing more than a housekeeper while her father pretends to be white and does what he can to make lots of money for them. He has a woodworking business that is thriving because they believe he is a white man. 

Nell is a slave who was brought to Philadelphia by her missus to make sure she is comfortable and looks her best. Nell wants to leave. To run. To escape being a slave. When she sees Charlotte at the market she believes she has found a way. Maybe.

While this book takes you on a journey to free Nell you also get a good look at what things happened in Philadelphia back then. The building then subsequent burning of Pennsylvania Hall. A place built by both black and white people to hopefully address many issues. Mainly to help black people get out of bad situations. To be free. To ensure that the laws were upheld. 

It makes my skin crawl to think of how human's were consider property back then. How awful that had to feel. Children ripped from their parents to be sold. Parents sold and taken who knows where. What a horrendous time that had to be. I hope that this never happens again to anyone or any race. 

This author did an excellent job of making this book feel so realistic. To make you feel what these people felt. These ladies felt. From their excitement to their darkest fears. The race to get back after being held. To be free.... Another good book to learn so much from. 

This was my BOTM choice and I'm so glad I chose it. It was also a NetGalley book. 

FIVE big stars and a high recommendation. 

About

A housemaid with a dangerous family secret conspires with a wealthy young abolitionist to help an enslaved girl escape, in volatile pre-Civil War Philadelphia.

The rebel . . . the socialite . . . and the fugitive. Together, they will risk everything for one another in this “beguiling story of friendship, deception, and women crossing boundaries in the name of freedom” (Lisa Wingate, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Lost Friends).

Philadelphia, 1837. After Charlotte escaped from the crumbling White Oaks plantation down South, she’d expected freedom to feel different from her former life as an enslaved housemaid. After all, Philadelphia is supposed to be the birthplace of American liberty. Instead, she’s locked away playing servant to her white-passing father, as they both attempt to hide their identities from slavecatchers who would destroy their new lives.

Longing to break away, Charlotte befriends Nell, a budding abolitionist from one of Philadelphia’s wealthiest Black families. Just as Charlotte starts to envision a future, a familiar face from her past reappears: Evie, her friend from White Oaks, has been brought to the city by the plantation mistress, and she’s desperate to escape. But as Charlotte and Nell conspire to rescue her, in a city engulfed by race riots and attacks on abolitionists, they soon discover that fighting for Evie’s freedom may cost them their own.