[A] feat of monumental thematic imagination ... Greenidge both mines history and transcends time, centering her post-Civil-War New York story around an enduring quest for freedom ... Greenidge shines in occupying the young girl’s mind ... This early period is enhanced by apt and tender dialogue, like the 'practiced quarrel' between Libertie’s mother and her friend. Indeed, the world of Kings County — modern-day Brooklyn — comes to life through vivid, textured details ... As lushly as Kings County is described, Greenidge grants the same favor to Jacmel, and despite the American filter, we can’t help hearing echoes of Edwidge Danticat in the line 'the market was a kingdom of women,' or in the Haitian Creole tune the children make up for Libertie upon her arrival ... The sheer force of Greenidge’s vision for her, for us all, gives us hope that it won’t be long now.
Greenidge is a master of character building ... Libertie is set in the midst of the Civil War, but the place and time these characters are in doesn’t make them unfamiliar ... Libertie is an easy page turner—its simple prose makes the plot digestible and the lyrical sentences sing louder ... Because the book is written in the first person, readers are allowed to get intimate with Libertie’s thoughts. She keeps so much of the way she thinks hidden from other characters (for a myriad of reasons), that it’s an intimate joy to get a glimpse into her logical, sympathetic mind ... a beautiful telling of gorgeously tragic characters who keep you rooting for them, even as they continue to stray and stray and stray.
Greenidge's prose is at its best when...visceral moments extend into understated metaphor ... There is a mystic heaviness to Libertie's language—her speech, her writing, her thoughts—and Greenidge structures the novel in sections hinging on significant plot points ... The spectrum of Black skin color surfaces again and again, an urgent reminder that the word 'colored,' which appears throughout the work, is an oversimplification of a nuanced, individuated experience ... The story focuses closely on the development of the marriage ... These sections make up the novel's richest, most intimate pages, while maintaining the work's overall interest in concepts of love, freedom and righteousness.
... a deftly realized work of historical fiction that in its exploration of race, gender, and colorism is also a vital text for our times ... The novel spins an enthralling narrative, beautifully rendered in rich prose with perceptively drawn characters ... Greenidge shows herself to be psychologically astute, with an eye for nuance and a deep awareness of the ways that history influences the present. Greenidge has already been compared to Toni Morrison because of her subject matter and luscious prose, and Libertie lives up to that comparison. In Libertie, Greenidge gives us a flawed but highly relatable narrator whose journey readers will eagerly follow to the end.
There’s plenty of Civil War fiction out there; it’s a seemingly bottomless category of novels exploring people both prominent and obscure whose lives are touched in some way by the war...With its revelatory history and fresh perspectives, Kaitlyn Greenidge’s splendid Libertie is a welcome addition to the canon ... The Haitian scenes allow Greenidge to explore the grinding universality of patriarchy, but this is balanced by Libertie’s determination to live her best life ... Passionate and brilliantly written, Libertie shines a light on a part of history still unknown by far too many but that is now getting the finest treatment.
Greenidge crafts Libertie not into a perfect heroine but into a nuanced one ... Truth and fiction blend seamlessly ... Greenidge’s years-long research into Black history elevates the novel into what scholar Saidiya Hartman calls 'critical fabulation.' It’s the practice of pulling from the often incomplete archives on pre-20th century Black life to weave together whole and vibrant stories. Seen alongside the real lives of Susan Smith McKinney Steward, a 19th century Black doctor and her daughter, Anna, Libertie’s story feels more like truth, like a life that perhaps was never documented for scholars to find decades later ... History buffs will love the various historical references that indirectly shape the landscape ... But Greenidge doesn’t rely solely on history to carry the plot of the book and instead imbues Libertie with the fire and will to make her own choices. She drives her own story forward and is an active character in the forces that shape her life ... While Greenidge tackles these unwieldy topics with ease in Libertie, she does not necessarily seek to answer how we eradicate these issues. We are, after all in 2021, still battling the same forces Libertie resists in the novel. Instead, Libertie asks us to reimagine what freedom, when it centers those most dispossessed of it, could look like. What would it mean for Libertie, a young Black woman, to build her own future? You’ll certainly want to read the book and find out.
Libertie’s greatest success is the perceptive, poetic voice of its central character. Through Libertie’s eyes, we learn not just about her community’s inhabitants, but about the forces of nature — plants, the ocean, weather patterns — that shape lives, often continuing to make meaning after great loss ... Greenidge’s choice of narrator allows readers to closely witness both the historic work of Dr. Sampson as well as the inner life of her daughter. Although Dr. Sampson’s letters to Libertie continue both stories, the novel’s overall dramatic tension drops once its setting shifts to Haiti. In this section, some readers may miss the beautifully drawn cast of characters from Kings County ... Overall, however, Libertie shines as a deeply moving portrait of two very different women and the fraught but loving intertwining of their lives.
[A] monumental, imaginative masterpiece of motherhood, self-discovery and freedom ... Greenidge clearly demonstrates that she is an expert at her craft ... This is history woven with magic and music, hope sharpened into specificity, a diasporic song brimming with bite, ache and wonder. The voice of the book grows as Libertie does, ever-inquisitive and revelatory. This is a brilliantly rendered, finely tuned, nuanced portrayal of motherhood, love and freedom ... Libertie reads like an act of love ... Greenidge writes beautiful, propulsive prose that is lyrical and frank, defiant and revelatory.
Greenidge skillfully shows the generational divide between Libertie and her mother, a widely applicable story across the ages ... The novel’s point of view works for the story. Libertie is the observer to her mother, which provides more opportunity for exposition and character growth ... Greenidge has reconstructed a time both unsung and ubiquitous. From icy Brooklyn brownstones to tropical Haiti, the book ties together histories in a way that renders them—especially in today’s world—both timeless and timely.
In the concluding — and, to my mind, less successful — Haitian section of this novel, historical realism gives way to Gothic excess: A weird mansion where all sounds are magnified, a rotten patriarch and even a confined madwoman overrun the storyline ... is most compelling when it hews closer to the known facts of the past and to the tensions, which Greenidge so acutely imagines, between a mother of vast accomplishment and a daughter who simply doesn't share that mother's ambition ... That passage and so many others like it generate a tension in the narrative of this fine novel and in us readers, too — between the residual currents of cruelties and compromises, and the emergent one of a more humane future that only yet more struggle might hope to bring about.
Few novels have as strong a sense of place as this fascinating blend of magical realism and African American historical fiction ... Greenidge succeeds beautifully at presenting the complexities of an intense mother-daughter bond, with its blend of unrealistic expectations, disappointments, and betrayals. At the same time, the historical context of traumatized escaped enslaved people, race riots, colorism, and conflicting visions on how to achieve Black freedom (stay in the U.S. and fight or build an all-Black civilization abroad?) weaves the story of one family into the larger tragedy of the African diaspora. Greenidge creates a richly layered tapestry of Black communal life, notably Black female life, and the inevitable contradictions and compromises of 'freedom.'
... Greenidge's second novel...is a richly detailed and well-researched work of historical fiction. Centering her narrative on the lives of Black women, she explores issues of racism, colorism and misogyny in lyrical and lovely prose.
Greenidge...delivers another genius work of radical historical fiction ... poetic narration ... This pièce de résistance is so immaculately orchestrated that each character, each setting, and each sentence sings.
Greenidge explores issues that are still real today while also inviting readers into historical moments that will be new to many ... Greenidge reminds us that music that has become so much a part of the American canon was born in the fields, a music made by enslaved Black people among enslaved Black people. Greenidge shows us aspects of history we seldom see in contemporary fiction.
