Our neighborhood book group has chosen "The Invention of Wings" by Sue Monk Kidd.

I majored in English Literature at Carnegie Mellon University, and, after receiving an M.Ed. from Lesley College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, taught Children's Literature and Reading in Massachusetts. I also taught both
reading and history in Bethesda, Maryland.

This book was not my choice, and I am having a difficult time reading it.

After I had come to the conclusion that the most bothersome factor was it was NOT written in the language of those times (as the books "A Gathering of Days" by BIos, and "Night Journeys" by Avi are), I pulled up an interview by BookBrowse with Ms. Monk Kidd and your interviewer states: "You have managed to capture the voice of that period .... You get the language of the day on paper." WHAT?

The interview is revealing in that Ms. Monk Kidd does not even pretend to have written "in the language of the times" (which she says contained "rhetoric, piety, and stilted phrases" - even though that is accurate!), and cavalierly confesses to having "brought a modern sensibility to it" and to setting "her (Sarah) free to speak from a timeless place". She admits to having read the Grimke sisters' diaries, and to having rejected that way of writing! I would much rather read the slave narrative by Elizabeth Keckley, "Behind the Scenes". She was Mary Todd Lincoln's companion, and it is an authentic book.

My "Children's Literature" professor in graduate school was Dr. May Reinhardt, who has a Ph. D. from Harvard. If an author was to choose to write historical fiction, we learned (quite forcefully) he/she had the duty to write accurately. Fabrication lessened any value a book of that genre might have.

The sad thing is that when something like this enters the mass market, people who have no clue of historic events (many of which Monk Kidd fudges) or language, are convinced "this is how it was". It does both our history and the history of language a disservice.