PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewA stirring mixture of memoir, genealogy, history and hopeful manifesto ... Goudeau is unsparing in her determination to tell \"hard truths\" about the past ... The result is a compelling but wide-ranging narrative that sometimes struggles to stay in focus.
Ilyon Woo
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewWoo tells the story... with a cinematic eye. She excels at setting scenes, conjuring the sensations experienced by the Crafts at each harrowing point ... Master Slave Husband Wife argues convincingly that the Crafts’ escape exposed and subverted the rickety foundations of the gendered and racialized categories of master and slave ... One great achievement of Woo’s book is its careful attention to the moments when Ellen Craft’s perspective does flash through the archive ... the part of her story Woo chooses to tell richly deserves this book-length treatment.
Ben Raines
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe book makes some missteps ... What distinguishes Raines’s book is not only the story of that discovery, but also his perspective as a river guide in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta ... Raines vividly conjures the watery landscape into which the Africans stepped, an alligator-filled swamp once thick with canebrake, now transformed by hydroelectric dams. Knowledge of these waterways also led Raines to locate the Clotilda in a place previous searchers had ignored ... Clearly, the story of the last slave ship is still far from over, and the \'extraordinary reckoning\' hinted at by Raines’s subtitle has barely begun.
