Books & Audiobooks
I love Historical Fiction because I learn about historical details that I never knew about. If you’re looking for a captivating read, put a hold on Keeper of Lost Children by Sadeqa Johnson right away. In this latest book, Johnson, the author of Yellow Wife and The House of Eve, focuses on the stories of three Black characters and their connection to a group of 500+ mixed-race children who were born during and after WWII to Black US soldiers and German women.
The story has three POVs:
- Ethel Gathers, 1951: she starts the Brown Baby Plan, a post-WWII initiative. As the wife of a U.S. officer stationed in Germany, she saw how these mixed-race children, given to Catholic orphanages for care, were neglected by German society and the U.S. government. She started up the program that set up adoptions of hundreds of these children into American families overseas.
- Ozzie Philips, 1948: a Black army officer who is eager to help and break down race barriers but finds that his opportunities as a Black man in the newly desegregated U.S. military are still very limited. He finds love with a German woman.
- Sophia Clark, 1965: a 15-year-old Black teen in the U.S. who leaves her unstable and abusive family life in a small rural town to attend a prestigious school on scholarship.
As the three stories converge, readers are privy to their experiences, losses and struggles in a world that, despite new changes in laws, continues to go out of its way to devalue them at every turn.
This book utterly captivated me. I was delightfully surprised at how equally invested I was in all three of the main characters’ lives. The subject matter is important, poignant (although not quite the tearjerker read I anticipated), and I appreciated how Johnson tells the story with compassion while not sugarcoating the experiences of the main characters or the hundreds of mixed-race children who history decidedly forgot.