Glory Over Everything

February 29, 2016
Grissom’s follow-up novel to her debut, The Kitchen House, breathes life into the captivating story of Jamie Pyke, son of a white slave owner and biracial mother. In the early 19th century, at the age of 13, Jamie, who had been raised white by his grandmother as a member of the plantation owner’s family, learned that his mother was a slave. After shooting his evil father, Marshall, who was going to sell him into slavery, Jamie fled his home in Virginia so that he could continue to live as a free white man in Philadelphia. Nursed back to health by Henry, a black man who lives by scavenging off the land, Jamie finds a job with a silversmith, eventually becoming a successful apprentice. Twenty years later, when Jamie is a thriving businessman, he is afraid to return to the South, believing that he might be captured. But he finds it hard to refuse Henry’s request to search for Henry’s young son, Pan, a valued member of Jamie’s household, who has likely been taken and sold as a slave. The journey south is filled with danger as Jamie meets up with Sukey, a slave who has been protecting Pan. Once Jamie joins Pan and Sukey, the three travel north and face the risks of the Underground Railroad. Grissom’s lyrical storytelling is rich with period details, and the novel can be read as either a memorable standalone or a captivating sequel to The Kitchen House. Agent: Rebecca Gradinger, Fletcher & Company.

April 15, 2016

In 1830 Philadelphia, artist Jamie Pyke passes as white, even though he is an escaped slave, the product of the plantation master's brutal rape of his mother. When a young black man has taken on as a servant is kidnapped and sold into slavery, Jamie returns to North Carolina to find and free him. Soon, slave hunters are seeking him as well as the boy. In this powerful narrative, Grissom relates harrowing truths about the slave experience by telling a gripping tale filled with vivid characters. The most memorable and admirable of them all is Sukey, a house slave who lost her tongue--her master cut it out--because she cried out when her husband and children were sold and taken away from her. And then there is Jamie, who for years has lived a lie concealing a part of himself--his blackness--that he loathes. VERDICT Grissom (The Kitchen House) is a superior storyteller who remarks notably on the consequences of an institution that made beasts of some while making liars of others. [See Prepub Alert, 10/12/15.]

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2015

Grissom's The Kitchen House, a surprise New York Times best seller, featured an orphaned Irish immigrant caught between her masters at an antebellum Virginia plantation and the slaves to whose community she can never belong. This stand-alone follow-up features the master of the plantation, Jamie Pyke, also the son of a slave, who has fled to Philadelphia and is passing as a wealthy white silversmith. When he takes a risky trip down South to rescue a servant kidnapped into slavery, he loses his home, business, and upper-crust lover and courts death in the Great Dismal Swamp. With a national tour.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.