Carolina Built

I was amazed and delighted to learn about Josephine Leary, a woman who achieved an incredible amount of success and self-sufficency for the time she lived in as well as for being a freed Black woman whose family was enslaved. The story that Kianna Alexander has created around this woman is full of historical detail - fashion, homewares, buggy driving lessons - due to her extensive research into the life and times of her subject.

Alexander also had access to Leary's personal papers, including some of her correspondence, legal and financial documents, as well as contemporaneous news and cultural documentation. Unfortunately, even with the support of this archival material, the book felt much more like being led on a tour of this extraordinary woman's life and very little like historical fiction. Leary and the people in her life have limited interiority, and the dialogue is stagey, often expositional or motive dumping and very rarely an examination of their experiences. A diary entry of Leary's is “quoted” early in the story, but I cannot tell if this is an actual (edited) diary entry from her personal effects or a fabrication; I lean towards the latter because of how clinical and impersonal the content is. Because we get very little understanding of who Leary is as a person, when emotional scenes do occur, everything feels like a pantomime, characters overemoting to convey a sense of stakes that have not been earned by the connection the reader tries to forge with Leary.

I can see this being an excellent high school read because of the educational and inspirational value, but the lack of character in the book was quite a disappointment for me. Perhaps this would have been better formed as a piece of non-fiction.