This book is the first sequel to A Virtuous Ruby and focuses on Ruby's younger sister Mags and Asa, a journalist who fought in the Great War and lost his leg. Asa knows Ruby and her husband Adam in Pittsburgh, and Ruby sends him down to Georgia to report on the lynchings taking place there at an escalating pace. Ruby also wants him to bring her younger sister back with him to Pittsburgh, both to help her with the birth of her baby and also to become his wife.
Much like in A Virtuous Ruby, Mags and Asa are immediately attracted to one another but certain they cannot be together, Asa because he thinks himself unfit to be any woman's husband due to his injury and Mags because of how dark her skin is. The setting and the issues involved are once again fascinating, as the story deals with Mags losing her place as a manager in the mill because of the men returning back from the war, and Asa detailing the brutal means the white people in power use to subjugate black mill workers. But the setting and history of the time is more affecting than the romance at the center of the book, which doesn't have enough genuine conflict there to sustain the entire novel.
Grade: C
Much like in A Virtuous Ruby, Mags and Asa are immediately attracted to one another but certain they cannot be together, Asa because he thinks himself unfit to be any woman's husband due to his injury and Mags because of how dark her skin is. The setting and the issues involved are once again fascinating, as the story deals with Mags losing her place as a manager in the mill because of the men returning back from the war, and Asa detailing the brutal means the white people in power use to subjugate black mill workers. But the setting and history of the time is more affecting than the romance at the center of the book, which doesn't have enough genuine conflict there to sustain the entire novel.
Grade: C
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