This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
In The Devil's Half Acre, Kristen Green (Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County) excavates the remarkable, long-erased story of a woman who survived slavery, built a better life for her children and ultimately converted the jail building that her enslaver operated into a Black men's seminary.
Mary Lumpkin was around 13 years old when she was forced to bear the children of her enslaver, Robert Lumpkin, who ran an infamous slave jail in Richmond, Va. Robert gave the jail to Mary in his will, and it eventually became what is now Virginia Union University. Lumpkin left behind some letters to the school but no personal papers or journals. Through examinations of property and school records in several states and mentions in other documents about the Lumpkin jail, Green painstakingly reconstructs the story of how Lumpkin kept her children from being sold away from her and arranged for them to be educated in Philadelphia. Lumpkin, claiming to be widowed, lived there with her children as a free woman through the Civil War--before then returning to Robert until his death in 1866.
Green acknowledges that we will never know the exact arrangement Mary and Robert Lumpkin made, the one that brought her back to him just before his death in 1866, when she was indisputably a free woman and which resulted in her inheritance of his real estate. But Green's research offers readers a moving, insightful picture of the families and friendships of enslaved women, those whose stories have long been erased. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

This review was originally published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​A young, mostly deaf woman becomes part of a research project in the mid-1960s in this compelling novel that explores human and dolphin social bonds and communication.
The Dolphin House by Audrey Schulman (Three Weeks in December) draws its inspiration from an experiment that took place in 1965. Cora is working as a waitress at a dockside restaurant on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands when, on a walk, she comes across four dolphins held in a lagoon. A scientist there asks Cora to keep notes while he steps away. The head of the project, Dr. Blum, is impressed with her observational skills and offers her a job. As Cora bonds with the dolphins, she takes on the role of their advocate and protector, eventually embarking on an ambitious project in which she lives with a dolphin named Junior in an attempt to teach him human speech.
Schulman's signature blend of science and literary fiction is on full display as Cora studies two different sets of minds, the dolphins' and the male scientists', all of whom to varying degrees view her as separate from their world. At best, they assume women are innately suited to teach language as part of a maternal instinct; at worst, she is treated as a novelty or a sex object. Readers will admire and feel for Cora as she uses her growing expertise--and her own experience analyzing different types of communication--in a quest to carve out some security for the dolphins and for herself. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: This thought-provoking novel, based on real events, probes communication between species and between sexes.