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The Wedding Gift: A Novel Audiobook
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When Cornelius Allen gives his daughter Clarissa's hand in marriage, he presents her with a wedding gift: the young slave she grew up with, Sarah. Sarah is also Allen's daughter and Clarissa's sister, a product of his longtime relationship with his house slave, Emmeline. When Clarissa's husband suspects that their newborn son is illegitimate, Clarissa and Sarah are sent back to her parents, Cornelius and Theodora, in shame, setting in motion a series of events that will destroy this once powerful family. Told through alternating viewpoints of Sarah and Theodora Allen, Cornelius' wife, The Wedding Gift is a stunning novel that shows where the complicated and compelling bonds and relationships between women explored in novels like The Help and The Secret Life of Bees began. Marlen Suyapa Bodden's novel is an intimate portrait of slavery and the 19th century South that shows where this particular American story and dynamic all started and will leave listeners breathless. Includes a reading group guide read by the author
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"The WEDDING GIFT is powerful and absorbing. Ms. Bodden's story-telling skills are on fine display in this intricately-plotted novel as she unflinchingly transports the reader to the most tragic, brutal time in the country's past. The characters are exceptionally well-rendered; the sense of who they are lingers beyond the last page. The author astutely captures the complexities of the relationships--especially between the enslaved black women and the oppressed white women. Also masterfully captured here is the boundless quest to live fully free."
— Diane McKinney-Whetstone, author of Tumbling
Quotes
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“If I were you, I wouldn’t make any plans for the rest of the day. You have in your hands a story of the tangled motives and self-destructive passions when whites and blacks became this close during the time of slavery—all told at a pell mell pace.”
— Tom Wolfe, New York Times bestselling author of Back to Blood -
“Fascinating, intriguing—a great story!”
— Kathleen Grissom, New York Times bestselling author of The Kitchen House -
“[A] compelling and fierce historical novel.”
— Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of Loose Cannons -
“The author astutely captures the complexities of the relationships—especially between the enslaved black women and the oppressed white women. Also masterfully captured here is the boundless quest to live fully free.”
— Diane McKinney-Whetstone, author of Tumbling -
“The strength of the novel is its slave narrative tone and its ability to demonstrate the pain of being owned by another human being. Many have heard of slavery; few know this story. It’s too important to overlook.”
— Daniel Black, author of Twelve Gates to the City -
“If I were you, I wouldn't make any plans for the rest of the day. You have in your hands a story of the tangled motives and self-destructive passions when whites and blacks became this close during the time of slavery--all told at a pell mell pace.
— Tom Wolfe, New York Times bestselling and Award-winning author of Back to Blood -
Bodden wraps some of the most complex issues facing the world today, slavery, racism, misogyny, and violence in an unflinching tall tale about an American family that is black and white. This compelling and fierce historical novel, where the slave master gives his white daughter his black daughter as a wedding gift, is set in the big house of a wealthy plantation before the Civil War and is based on a court case from the 1840s in Talladega, Alabama.
— Henry Louis Gates, Jr. -
Fascinating, intriguing--a great story!
— Kathleen Grissom, New York Times bestselling author of The Kitchen House -
The strength of the novel is its slave narrative tone and its ability to demonstrate the pain of being owned by another human being. Many have heard of slavery; few know this story. It's too important to overlook.
— Daniel Black, author of Twelve Gates to the City
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About Marlen Suyapa Bodden
Marlen Suyapa Bodden is a lawyer at the Legal Aid Society in New York City, the nation’s oldest and largest law firm for the poor. She drew on her knowledge of modern and historical slavery, human trafficking, and human rights abuses to write The Wedding Gift, her first novel. She is a graduate of New York University School of Law and Tufts University. In 2012, the University of Rhode Island awarded her an honorary doctor of laws degree.
About the Narrators
Jenna Lamia is an actress and award-winning audiobook narrator. She has won the prestigious Audie Award, as well as more than a dozen AudioFile Earphones Awards. Her narration of The Book of Polly was named a 2018 Outstanding Audiobook Narration by RUSA. She narrated Mary E. Pearson’s The Adoration of Jenna Fox, which won a YALSA Amazing Audiobooks for Young Adults award, and Carol Lynch Williams’ The Chosen One, for which she received the 2010 Audie Award for Best Female Solo Narration. She has appeared on and off-Broadway, and her acting credits include appearances on Oz, Law & Order: SVU, and NYPD Blue. She has attended Amherst College, New York University, and the Sorbonne in Paris.
January LaVoy, winner of numerous awards for narration, was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine in 2019. She is an American actress best known for her character Noelle Ortiz on the ABC daytime drama One Life to Live. In addition to working extensively in narration and television, including roles on Law & Order and All My Children, she has worked on and off Broadway as well as in regional theater.