"I will tell you what I know, and you will make of it what you can."
That's the spirit of Dorothy's letters to Caleb — these slow, aching dispatches from one era to another — and honestly, it's the spirit of the whole novel. Tara Conklin is asking you to sit with incomplete history, with the gaps in the record, and decide what justice looks like when the evidence is a painting and a name half-remembered.
I finished this one during a Saturday morning walk along the lakefront with Denise. She could tell something was working on me because I kept stopping mid-stride, just standing there like a fool while joggers swerved around me. She finally asked if I was okay. I told her I was thinking about authorship. About who gets credit. She said, "You're being weird again," which is fair.
Two Stories, One Carrying the Other
Here's the thing nobody wants to say plainly: Josephine's story is the novel. Her sections — the fear, the calculations of an enslaved woman deciding whether tonight is the night she runs, the way she watches Lu Anne Bell paint and you slowly realize whose eye is actually behind those brushstrokes — that's where the book lives and breathes. Conklin writes Josephine's 1852 Virginia with a specificity that earns your attention. The physical details of the Bell household, the texture of Josephine's daily survival, the weight of every interaction where she must perform deference while plotting escape. This is why we still read the classics, and why historical fiction at its best can sit right beside them.
Lina Sparrow's modern storyline, though? Look, I teach teenagers. I know what it looks like when someone's doing the assignment competently but their heart's in a different essay. Lina's a junior lawyer at a big firm hunting for a lead plaintiff in a reparations lawsuit, and she stumbles onto Josephine's story through Lu Anne Bell's art. It's a perfectly functional legal-thriller framework. But the firm dynamics, the love interest, the daddy issues — it reads like scaffolding. Necessary scaffolding, sure. But you can see the joints.
The readers who gave this two and three stars? They're not wrong that the Lina sections drag. They're just not acknowledging how much Josephine's story compensates. It's an uneven novel. But the peaks are high enough to justify the valleys.
Bahni Turpin Knows Where the Grief Lives
Turpin is one of those narrators who understands that pause is punctuation. Her Josephine is quiet and watchful — you can hear the restraint in Turpin's delivery, the way she pulls back vocally to convey a woman who's learned that expressiveness is dangerous. When Josephine does let something slip — a flash of anger, a moment of tenderness — Turpin lets it land like a crack in a dam. Her shift into male voices is smooth enough; she drops into a lower register for the men without overplaying it, which I appreciate.
But here's where I have to be honest: the narrative voice stays pretty level across both timelines. Josephine's sections and Lina's sections don't sound as different as they should. You're toggling between 1852 and modern Manhattan, between an enslaved woman and a twenty-something lawyer, and Turpin's baseline tone doesn't shift enough to make those transitions feel like genuine time-jumps. It's a subtle problem, but at fourteen-plus hours, subtle problems compound. By hour eight, I found myself relying on context clues — names, settings — rather than vocal register to know which story I was in.
(My students would hate this book, by the way. Too slow for them. Fourteen hours? They'd riot. But they'd remember Josephine. Some characters stick whether you want them to or not.)
Who Should Clear Their Schedule — and Who Shouldn't
If you loved The Known World by Edward P. Jones, this is its spiritual successor in some ways — that same interest in the complicated interior lives of enslaved people, the refusal to reduce them to symbols. Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois belongs in that same conversation — Honorée Fanonne Jeffers does something similar across generations, and the audiobook wrecked me in exactly the way Josephine's sections did here. If dual-timeline novels are your thing and you can tolerate one storyline outshining the other, you'll find real reward here. But if pacing matters to you more than anything — if you need both threads pulling equally — you might find yourself restless during Lina's chapters. Fair warning: Dorothy's letters are historically rich but long-winded in audio. The prose deserves to be savored, but some passages test your patience.
This is a book that demands your full attention. Not background listening. Not multitasking. Sit with it.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For — Mostly
Conklin wrote half a great novel and half a good one, and Turpin narrates both with genuine care even when her instrument could use more range between timelines. The question of artistic authorship — who really painted those canvases, and what it means that we'll never know for certain — that's the engine, and it's a powerful one. Josephine alone is worth the fourteen hours. I just wish Lina had been given prose worthy of standing next to her.
