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The Undertaker's Assistant
The Undertaker's Assistant | Amanda Skenandore
3 posts | 6 read | 9 to read
Set during Reconstruction-era New Orleans, and with an extraordinary and unforgettable heroine at its heart, The Undertaker’s Assistant is a powerful story of human resilience—and of the unlikely bonds that hold fast even in our darkest moments. “The dead can’t hurt you. Only the living can.” Effie Jones, a former slave who escaped to the Union side as a child, knows the truth of her words. Taken in by an army surgeon and his wife during the War, she learned to read and write, to tolerate the sight of blood and broken bodies—and to forget what is too painful to bear. Now a young freedwoman, she has returned south to New Orleans and earns her living as an embalmer, her steady hand and skillful incisions compensating for her white employer’s shortcomings. Tall and serious, Effie keeps her distance from the other girls in her boarding house, holding tight to the satisfaction she finds in her work. But despite her reticence, two encounters—with a charismatic state legislator named Samson Greene, and a beautiful young Creole, Adeline—introduce her to new worlds of protests and activism, of soirees and social ambition. Effie decides to seek out the past she has blocked from her memory and try to trace her kin. As her hopes are tested by betrayal, and New Orleans grapples with violence and growing racial turmoil, Effie faces loss and heartache, but also a chance to finally find her place . . .
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review
McCombsonMain
The Undertaker's Assistant | Amanda Skenandore
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Pickpick

How much can we, today, possibly understand about the Reconstruction era? What was it like for the freedmen (and women) of the south who broke boundaries and fought for justice, often at the expense of their own lives? Can I, a white woman in the 21st century, ever hope to fully grasp the hopes and disappointments of that time?

https://mccombsonmain.wordpress.com/2019/07/31/review-the-undertakers-assistant-...

review
xxjenadanxx
The Undertaker's Assistant | Amanda Skenandore
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Pickpick

Set in Reconstruction Era New Orleans, this is the story of Effie, a former slave who‘s returning south in search of her past and a new beginning. As a black female embalmer she is an oddity, even up North, but she is confident in her abilities and has little use for the living. That is until a chance encounter with a handsome republican legislator sets her on a path of self discovery that changes everything.

Netgalley ARC

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xxjenadanxx
The Undertaker's Assistant | Amanda Skenandore
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#weekendreads @rachelsbrittain

1. The Undertaker‘s Assistant (ARC)
2. The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren and the rest of my Netgalley ARC‘s
3. Braving the Wilderness by Brene Brown