The Revisioners

Starred review from September 16, 2019
Sexton (A Kind of Freedom) returns with this excellent story of a New Orleans family’s ascent from slavery to freedom, paying poetic tribute to their fearlessness and a “mind magic” that fixes the present, sees into the future, and calls out from the past. In alternating chapters, two women tell their haunting, frightening, and ultimately uplifting stories: Ava, a mixed-race single mom struggling to establish a career and raise a teenage son in 2017, and her great-great-grandmother Josephine, a former slave who in 1924 proudly runs the family farm. Ava’s decision to be the caregiver for her rich white grandmother, Martha, as she slips into dementia will trigger disturbing premonitions for her own cancer-stricken mother, a doula named Gladys. Josephine’s story focuses largely on her struggle to turn over management of the family farm to a son intent on standing up to the Klan—and a troubling interaction with a shy white neighbor who seeks out Josephine’s rumored powers to get pregnant and appease an abusive husband. A chilling plot twist reveals the insidious racial divide that stretches through the generations, but it’s the larger message that’s so timely. “Ain’t no use in hate,” Josephine’s mother advises. “Whatever you trying to get away from, hate just binds you to it.” This novel is both powerful and full of hope.

Starred review from January 10, 2020

In her second novel (following the National Book Award long-listed A Kind of Freedom), Sexton weaves well-crafted intergenerational narratives, each set in a different era and each giving voice to strong women of color. Ava, a single, multiracial mother, lives in post-Katrina New Orleans with her son, King. After struggling to make ends meet, she moves in with her aging grandmother, a white woman who has begun to show signs of dementia. Sexton's other narrative tells the story of Ava's not-so-distant ancestor Josephine at two different points in her life. As a child, Josephine was enslaved on a plantation prior to the Civil War along with her parents. As an older woman, she is devoted to her family's successful farm, though she is occasionally sought for her expertise as a conjurer.

VERDICT The dynamics of a brutal past encompassing violence and racial inequality is core here, but the narrative is significant for acknowledging that elements of that past are not completely past and for portraying two fearless women separated by time but both dealing with white women's racism. Recommended for all collections.--Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2019
When Ava and her son, King, move in with Ava's white grandmother, Ava brings a picture of Josephine, her enslaved ancestor who purchased her own farm in 1925. Sexton's (A Kind of Freedom, 2017) powerful, deeply personal second novel alternates between Ava's and Josephine's stories as each woman learns the boundaries of what she can endure amidst racial injustice. King makes friends with two white girls at his new school, but Ava wonders if this is safe. Ava's grandmother starts to deteriorate and threaten them?but can they afford to leave her house? Meanwhile, Josephine's family helps its enslaver's wife with a problematic pregnancy. Will they be blamed? Ava and Josephine each constantly navigate the dangerous inequities of their eras. It's rare for dual narratives to be equally compelling, and Sexton achieves this while illustrating the impact of slavery long after its formal end. Nurturing, motherhood, and pregnancy rise up as important themes. Readers will engage fully in this compelling story of African American women who have power in a culture that attempts to dismantle it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from September 1, 2019
A conjure woman who escaped slavery obliquely guides her descendants in 2017 New Orleans. This second novel from Sexton confirms the storytelling gifts she displayed in her lushly readable debut, A Kind of Freedom. The new book opens as cash-strapped Ava Jackson is reluctantly moving herself and her 12-year-old son, King, into the mansion of a declining Martha Dufrene, her white grandmother. The first sentence--"It was King who told me we forgot the photograph"--suggests this object will matter. And indeed, Ava goes back for the portrait of Miss Josephine, her "grandmother's great-grandmother," a woman with second sight. Her part in the secret sect "the revisioners" is shrouded in time, but Josephine serves as the spine of this deftly structured novel. In one thread of chapters, she narrates her 1855 escape from bondage as a child and, in another, her rise to rural matriarch. In the framed 1924 photo, a widowed Josephine stands on the edge of her farm: "I still find new mercy in the fact this house belongs to me; that the pine boards overlap to keep the rodents out; the windows swing all the way open." But this is the year that an aging Josephine makes the mistake of pitying a white neighbor, Charlotte, who confides that she married her brutish husband because "her mama said that he wore nice shoes, that his mama had all her teeth." A third braid of chapters follows Ava, letting the reader slowly grasp a parallel treachery coiled in Martha and Charlotte. Martha's creepy home conjures its own Get Out-flavored claustrophobia, and Charlotte eventually cozies up to the Klan. In this wondrous telling, King can lie on the sofa playing Fortnite in the same short book where Josephine's fleeing family is hobbling "the other horses whose shoes need to be damaged so no one could follow us straight away." At the intriguing crossroads of the seen and the unseen lies a weave among five generations of women.

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