Roman conventionnel qui raconte l'histoire de l'arrière grand'mère de l'auteure : esclave, petite fille puis cuisinière dans une plantation, elle vit la guerre de sécession, la fin des plantations, l'avènement des petits blancs et du ku klux klan, la difficile réinsertion hors du système des plantations dans ce sud dont on nous décrit plus souvent les fastes. ( )

Much better than Gone with the Wind and I really liked that book and movie. ( )

From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen
Jubilee tells the life story of Vyry, daughter of the houseslave and the "master," from "slavery-time" through the Civil War. Dr. Margaret Walker, respected African-American poet and scholar, heard this story as a child from her own grandmother, Vyry's daughter, and vowed to write it so the world could know. Vyry is intelligent, strong, honest, brave, enduring: heroic qualities common to many "ordinary" African-American women but still painfully scarce in literature. Dr. Walker spent thirty years on the research for Jubilee and the result is a factual book that reads like a good friend talking. We see and feel the details of Vyry's daily life: the foods she grew and ate, the colors and textures of the quilts she made, the grotesque realities of slavery, the joys and sorrows of love. And in the moments of Vyry's life - her tiny girlhood, the death of her mother, the sale of her "other-mother," her first love, the births and lives of her children, the war and resettlement, Ku Klux Klan violence, and, finally, a home of her own - we see a big picture of this part of American history from an urgently caring and essential perspective. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. --This text refers to the Paperback edition. ( )