A Novel
by Princess Joy L. Perry
Three people - two enslaved, one indentured - live beside each other, fighting, and sometimes failing, to be more than their pasts say they should be.
As the seventeenth century burns to a close in Tidewater, Virginia, America's character is wrought in the fires of wealth, race, and freedom.
Young Bless, the only child left to her enslaved mother, stubbornly crafts the terms of her vital existence. She stands as the lone bulwark between her mother and irreparable despair, her mother's only possibility of hope, as Bless reshapes the boundaries of love.
David is a helping child and a solace to his parents, and he gave a purpose to their trials. His survival hinges on his mother's shrewd intellect and ferocious fight, but his sustenance is his freed Black father's dream of emancipation for the entire family.
Jack Dane, a Scots-Irish boy, sails to Britain's colonies when his father sells him into indentured servitude as an escape from poverty. There Jack learns from the rich the value of each person's life.
A breathtaking, haunting, and epic saga, This Here Is Love intimately intertwines us with these beautifully drawn, unforgettable American characters. Bless, taken to serve the slaveowner's daughter, must decide where she belongs: with the enslaved or above them. David, sold away from his people, retreats into himself even as he yearns to unite with others. Jack, acting impetuously, changes his fortune, but will doing so sacrifice his humanity?
All three come together on Jack's land. As they face and challenge each other, they will relinquish and remake beliefs about family and freedom, even as they confront the limits of love.
"In This Here Is Love, Princess Joy L. Perry refuses to shy away from the cruelties of surviving the realities of seventeenth-century America and has charted the terrible truths of her characters' impossible choices—even as they map a journey toward their own freedom, their futures, their shared humanity. In these pages, we have love rooted and rebuilt in the land that stripped these compelling characters of almost all they have, and a blueprint for how hope may still move us forward." —DéLana R. A. Dameron, author of Redwood Court, a Reese's Book Club Selection
"This Here is Love is an utterly riveting intergenerational saga of love, betrayal, theft and resilience. Princess Joy L. Perry laces every chapter with fireworks and unforgettable characters―all off-kilter, wounded and searching for solace in this epic tale of slavery and freedom." ―Lawrence Hill, author of Someone Knows My Name, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize
This information about This Here Is Love was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Princess Joy L. Perry is the recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship and a winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award. Her short stories have appeared in All About Skin, African American Review, and Kweli Journal. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia.
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