Night Wherever We Go - Tracey Rose Peyton - ★★★.¼

AUTHOR: Tracey Rose Peyton

GENRE: Historical Fiction

RATING: 3.25 Stars.

In a Nutshell: Some hits, some misses. A good debut attempt, but didn’t click as well as I had wanted it to. Interesting content though.

Story synopsis:

1852, Texas. The Harlow family owns a struggling plantation. To turn their fortunes around, they decide to hire a “stockman” to impregnate their women slaves. The enslaved women get to know of this scheme and group up to figure a way around the problem. Each of them has a different opinion about the issue, but they know that if they have to survive, they need to work as a team, and without being discovered.

The story comes to us in a limited third person narration of various characters, but at times, it dips into an unidentified first person plural.

Where the book worked for me:

✔ As is to be expected in historical slave narratives, there are plenty of dark and gritty moments. The book offers a glimpse of the thoughts behind the women whose lives were not in their control and yet who tried so hard to maintain control over it in whatever limited ways they could. One of my favourite mutinous act by them was their habit of referring to the Harlows as ‘Lucys’, short for Lucifer, the reason being that their masters were ‘spawn of the devil’, lol.

✔ The camaraderie between the six enslaved women comes out quite well. Unlike many such books, this one doesn’t club them into a homogenous “African” mould but reminds us that slaves did come from different parts of the continent and treats them distinctly. It also shows their antagonistic sides rather than depicting them as being always in sync with each other. I loved this realism.

✔ The era seems to have been captured quite authentically, with the lifestyle of both master and slave coming out well. I never knew of a stockman, so to read about his role in increasing the slaves count was shocking.

✔ Of the six women slaves, Nan – the oldest- has the most compelling track. With her love for traditions and her knowledge about humankind, she makes for an interesting protagonist. The youngest of the slaves, Sarah, also gets a meaty track.

✔ Unlike most such books, the Harlows aren’t wealthy landowners but in great financial difficulties, trying their best to survive. This makes their track a somewhat novel one, as it goes much beyond the typical physical punishment routines that we see in this genre and shows us why they did what they did without justifying their actions. The writing shows us the human side of the Harlows without making them seem stereotypical.

✔ The title and cover are perfect for the book.

Where the book could have worked better for me:

❌ The blurb made the book sound like a story of rebellion. But it was more of a survival story, with only tiny acts of mutiny. The blurb also makes the ‘stockman’ sound like a vital part of the plot, but his angle is more of a catalyst to the other events than the main track itself. In other words, good story but misleading blurb.

❌ Except for Sarah and Nan, the other women don’t get much opportunity to reveal their personality. The remaining four women – Patience, Alice, Lulu and Junie – are somewhat similar in voice, with only tiny facts to distinguish across them. Some of their tracks come to an abrupt end midway, and other women slaves enter the picture. So we don’t even get to know all of them well.

❌ The narrative, while mostly in a third person focussing on the slaves, tends to slip into the first person plural many times. The blurb makes it clear that there were six women slaves, and even when slaves enter or exit the plot, they are all referred to by name. So who is this unnamed first person narrator who tells us the story using “we”? That was an odd writing choice. Even if it intended to make us feel closer to the slaves, it should still have identified the speaker.

❌ The writing is too detached. I understand how this might work for some readers, as it keeps the brutalities on the proceedings somewhat impersonal. But I expected to be more touched by such a traumatising story, but the writing style left me feeling nothing.

❌ (Somewhat mixed feelings about this point, but slightly tilted towards the negative side, hence including it in this section.) Religion and faith find a regular mention in the arcs of the enslaved women and their masters. I liked how some of the women were shown as believing in their traditional gods/deities as well as the God from the Bible. However, I found the latter somewhat unconvincing. The time period of the story and the character detailing indicates that the women remember their home country, miss their original rituals and beliefs, and still follow their own traditions regardless of what the masters have imposed on them. Would they still be so free and willing to believe blindly in the Christian God and refer to him even before their own gods? Not sure. I am not saying it is impossible, but I am not convinced as well.

❌ While the start captivated me, the story soon becomes stuck in a quagmire. The writing gets somewhat repetitive in between. At times, the plot is more like an episodic series of events than a cohesive overarching story. Towards the end, the story moves again, but I didn’t like the ending. It was too hurried and clumsy, as if it had to wrap up everything as quickly as possible. Moreover, there’s one subtrack towards the end that goes in a direction away from the core narrative.

All in all, this is a decent debut novel, taking a not-so-common angle of the historical slave story and trying to give it a rebellious twist. It may not have been entirely successful in my eyes, but it certainly wasn’t a bad attempt. Maybe if I hadn’t read so many slave stories, I might have enjoyed this more. All I know is that I expected to be emotionally devastated after reading this, but I came away feeling just minimally saddened.

My thanks to Ecco and NetGalley for the DRC of “Night Wherever We Go”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

Trigger warnings: It’s a slave narrative, so it obviously doesn’t make for easy reading. Plenty of triggers, mostly related to physical and sexual abuse.