Review: A More Perfect Union

A More Perfect Union by Tammye Huf
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. 

People say it's the disease and the hunger that's killing us, but I say it's the being poor. 

Told in first person point-of-view chapters alternating, mostly, between Henry a young adult in Ireland slowly starving to death with his family because of the potato famine and greed of the English landowners and Sarah a young enslaved woman in Virginia who gets sold away from her family to masters who like to wield the word of God to their own means, A More Perfect Union was a story of survival and living in spite of. 

“[...] Everything you do gets paid for one way or the other. If you ain't the one paying, you can sure bet someone else is.” 

Henry's journey from leaving Ireland and the absolute no way to survive there after his parents die and his arrival in New York after being the only sibling to survive the ship ride over showed how he adapted the attitude of survival at all costs. He does things in New York he wouldn't have thought himself capable of to survive, in spite of the “Irish Need Not Apply” and eventually ends up a traveling blacksmith. He meets Sarah on the road one day and instantly feels something for her. Sarah now lives on Jubilee Plantation and is enslaved in the house to look after the master's son. Coming from Ireland, Henry has some ignorance about the American slavery system and he doesn't always respect the danger Sarah is in. Sarah understands it and when she sees that Henry has come to her plantation and the master hires him on to stay awhile, she knows she should stay away but also has feelings for Henry. 

This is what it looks like when a master holds you special. 

There is a third pov from a character called Maple and even though Sarah and Henry are clearly the focus of the story (the author's great-great-grandparents are the inspiration for Sarah and Henry), I often found Maple's povs the most powerful. Maple is the half-sister of the master's wife and after years of her ancestors being raped by their self-imposed masters, she could pass for white. She grew-up with and raised her half-sister and when the half-sister got married, their father gave Maple to her and Maple was forced to leave behind her mother, husband, and daughter Rose. Maple comes off hateful and mean to Sarah but readers get Maple's inner thoughts through her pov and her boiling rage and PTSD from her enslavement experiences had me understanding her more. 

But I know I can't claim innocence no matter how small a cog of the wheel I am. 

The bulk of the story is Henry and Sarah falling in love, Henry learning that any oppression he experienced as Irish is not the same as what Sarah lives, and them trying to figure out a way to be together. There's plantation politics between the other enslaved individuals at Jubilee, how they protect and fight for each other in the ways that they can, danger from the overseer, and a good look at how the master and missus think they are better than other owners because they follow the word of God. I liked how the author showed the hypocrisy of the master by claiming to be a man of god and then using it as a tool to try and placate Northern abolitionists and use it as a weapon against the people of Jubilee. 

A country can claim that wrong is right, but that'll never erase the sin of it. 

Given the time and place of this story, there are hard truths and experiences discussed and shown, definite content warnings for the control the master and overseer have over other human beings, the rapes (shown, remembered, and thought of), and whippings. I think Sarah not letting Henry absolve/explain away his making the chains that at times bound her, Maple's fraught determination to try and save her daughter, and Bessie, an older enslaved woman's fate, will be scenes that will stay with readers long after they finish the book. 

“I promise that I'll be yours if you'll be mine.” 

The ending was rushed through a little quickly, we get a brief, quick look at the, in spite of the obstacles, life Sarah and Henry forged for themselves to give some uplifting. This was a memorable story for its hard truths, Maple's rage, and promise.

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