“Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life. Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true.” —Ruth Bader Ginsberg
“Life is a brief candle, but love is a craving for time.”
Rest in peace Ruth. Thank you for being your own person—for being a leader and a true visionary. We need strong women with strong values more now than ever before. Of course, I’m particularly fond of any rockstar dynamo who will acknowledge the power of reading to help open doors and lasso dreams. I wonder if the notorious, glorious RGB picked up a copy of The Confessions of Frannie Langton in the past year?
Something tells me the Supreme Court Justice would thoroughly appreciate Frannie Langton, a Jamaican slave who “travel[ed] across the Atlantic and through the darkest channels of history.” Literacy bought her thoroughfare. (She was part of a “little colonial experiment” by a depraved scientist in Jamaica, which afforded her an education, despite being enslaved.) Swapped from an “iron cage for a gilded one,” Frannie was gifted to George Benham, a scientist who was purported to be the finest mind in England. Benham’s French wife, Marguerite, forms an unlikely “special” relationship with Frannie. She shattered the Jamaican girl’s belief that every white you’ll ever meet “either wants to tame you or rescue you.” So how do both of the Benhams wind up being murdered at the hands of this mulatta slave? Is she responsible for their untimely deaths? You’re gonna have to read to find out. It’s true: “The Confessions of Frannie Langton is large, lavish and gutsy, a skilled and intoxicating mash-up of slave narrative, gothic romance, whodunit and legal thriller.”
P.S. I did some supplemental reading about Sarah Collin’s debut novel. This was pretty insightful: “Frannie is an extreme version of Jane Eyre. She is a powerless child brought up horribly in a horrible place, and her voice thunders in exactly the same way. She often says things that are true, but jarring, such as: “A man writes to separate himself from the common history; a woman writes to try to join it.” Her pronouncements are just like those of Jane, who isn’t afraid to tell Rochester that she loves Thornfield in part at least because she has not “been buried under inferior minds.” Like Jane again, Frannie is awkward and pretentious in her cleverness because she has never been allowed to exercise it properly. Rochester calls Jane a caged bird, but Frannie is a battery hen.” If you love Jane, you’re gonna like Frannie.