![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Then I ended up really liking the title, because it was a book about healing and reconciliation. We needed a placeholder when we turned the manuscript in and my agent said “I think we should call it Balm,” and I said okay. In Balm, Perkins-Valdez drops us into the bodies of her three main characters–Madge, Hemp, and Sadie–and we walk closely alongside them as they explore how to deal with loss, community, love, family, and most importantly, survival during a period in history that had shaken the nation to its core.Īctually, the book was titled by my agent. Again, Perkins-Valdez shakes things up by allowing us to witness these characters movement through a place not known for its depiction in Civil War narratives: Chicago. She continues to provide innovative historical narratives with Balm, which follows three distinct characters as they try to piece together their lives immediately following the Civil War. Instead, we followed these slave women to a resort in Ohio, our expectations of the traditional narrative shaken. Wench, her best-selling debut novel, looked at the lives of slave women–but Perkins-Valdez took them off of the oft-used setting of the Southern plantation. ![]() Dolen Perkins-Valdez is known for work that uses historical settings to examine complicated issues of humanity, relationships, race, and class. ![]()
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