A million nightingales /

Moinette was born a slave on a sugar-cane plantation called Azure, in early-nineteenth-century Louisiana. She was a lovely child of mixed race. Her mother, the plantation laundress, guarded and guided Moinette with a fierce maternal love. But even a strong mother-daughter bond can't protect Moinette, as a teenager, from abruptly being sold off the plantation without even a chance to look upon her mother's face one last time. But Moinette has mettle and ingenuity--and literacy--as well as beauty, and her determination to return to Azure to reunite with her mother is a powerful urge. It will lead Moinette through tribulations, even abuse, but ultimately triumph in the form of manumission. Told in her own voice, Moinette's story is a richly textured picture of antebellum plantation life--not about whippings and insurrections per se but about human ownership of other humans, specifically the psychological damage done by that dreadful institution when hearts along with families were torn apart. Straight has illuminated a corner of hopefulness in an otherwise grim world that stood behind one of manners and hoopskirts. The adjacent Read-alikes column will lead readers to other novels that are set in the same place and time or that deal with the issue of slavery. --Brad Hooper Copyright 2006 Booklist

Set in Southern plantations and bayous during the years just following the Louisiana Purchase, Straight's impressionistic character study effectively evokes the conflicted m?lange of races, nationalities and cultures that defined the early 19th-century territory. The novel spans the life of Moinette, a "mulatresse," beginning with the events that wrench her from her mother at age 14, to her final days in her 40s. Moinette's first young mistress, Cephaline, exposes her to book learning, and Moinette struggles to negotiate the contradictions between the language of science and her mother's belief in traditional Senegalese spirits, a dichotomy that haunts her throughout her life. After Cephaline's premature death, Moinette, light-skinned and beautiful, is sold upriver and separated from her beloved mother. She repeatedly suffers sexual assault and must use her wits to protect herself, and later her son and daughters. While Straight (Highwire Moon) vividly depicts the danger and degradation black women faced, she also makes feminist comparisons between Moinette's enslavement and the situations of her wealthy white mistresses. However, the terms of Moinette's very sophisticated understanding of what's happening to her seem anachronistic, and the success she achieves, combined with the handy coincidences that lead to it, although tempered with tragedy, are too convenient to be entirely convincing. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In Straight's latest novel (after Highwire Moon), Moinette, a mulatto slave girl, lives on a plantation south of New Orleans in the early 1800s. She is a personal maid to the daughter of her owners, who are trying to prepare their daughter for her entrance into the social world and marriage. When the young woman suddenly dies, Moinette is abruptly sold and shipped off, torn from her mother and the only world she has ever known. The novel follows her as she begins life on another plantation; tries to escape; is brutally punished, raped, and impregnated; and is finally sold again to another slave owner under whose employ she saves her money in the hopes of one day buying her freedom and reuniting with her mother and child. This is an undeniably tragic and passionately imagined story of a victim of a repressive culture and legal and class system. While for some readers the gothic horror of the story may be intensified by Straight's stream-of-consciousness style, with its constant flow of French phrases, African words, heightened sensory impressions, sentence fragments, and illiterate slave speech idioms, those not caught up in the character's emotional world may find the overall effect dissipated. For larger public and academic libraries.-Jim Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.