Book Review of Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge

Book Review of Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge: The novel "Libertie" Inspired by the life of one of the first Black female doctors in the United States and rich with historical detail. Here, I'm going to do a short review of Libertie a novel by Kaitlyn Greenidge. 

Book Review on Libertie novel

Libertie is an unforgettable story about the meaning of freedom by Award winning author Kaitlyn Greenidge. 

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Libertie novel Review

Libertie is Kaitlyn Greenidge's sophomore novel, her debut novel We Love You, Charlie Freeman came out in 2017. So in Libertie we follow our titular main character who was born as a free person in New York shortly before the civil war and we follow her as she grows up through the reconstruction era. 

Libertie's mother is actually based on a real person by the name of Susan Smith Mckinney Steward who was the first black woman to be accepted to a medical school in New York in the 1870s here in the United States.

And she went on to become the first black woman doctor in the state of New York, so because of Libertie's exceptional mother who is a fictionalized version of this first woman to become a black female doctor. 

Libertie is under a lot of pressure from her mother to join the medical field and go to school for medicine and her mother actually during the novel sends her away to medical school in Ohio. 

So throughout the novel we are following Libertie as she's kind of coming into her own and determining what she truly wants out of life and whether or not. That is medical practice or a life that's a bit less kind of exceptional than her mother hopes her to be.

So starting off with the things that I most enjoyed about this novel. I think the biggest thing for me was Kaitlyn Greenidge's use of the historical record in developing and creating this sense of the reconstruction era. 

Greenidge actually worked as an oral historian which is how she first learned of Mckinney Stewart's story and that was where she found the inspiration to later write this novel. 

And so you can really tell her background and history and her interest in history as it shines through the level of detail that's put into this novel. 

I would say that's also true of other descriptions in this work and not necessarily just the time and place. There's very much attention to detail throughout the rest of the writing style as well.

Which I really appreciated alongside the historical details, there's also a lot of discussion around Haitian Voodoo and the gods that are inspired by traditional West African mythology. 

Libertie meets an American born Haitian doctor, who comes to study under her mother. And the two of them kind of form a romance when liberty is home from her medical schooling and he's very knowledgeable and interested about haitian viewers.

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I will say my one critique about that is that I wish it had been more cohesively incorporated into the novel, as I felt like that was a really interesting aspect of the story that came up at different points throughout the story. 

And I think thought-provoking themes surrounding race and racial politics during this time particularly the juxtaposition between the racial politics of haiti which at that point was an independent country that was a former colony and had a revolution versus.

The United States which had just had the civil war but there was still a lot of kind of racial rushing to come. Obviously there's also some discussion in this novel about Liberia.

And the creation of liberia and liberia's purpose and there's a lot of discussions between different characters on their different viewpoints. Kind of what is the best way to move forward in terms of black liberation and freedom and what those words mean kind of in the context of your personal life which I really appreciated. 

I thought those themes were done really well and were definitely I think the strongest point of the novel for me. 

However despite the thematic explanations and the attention to detail in the writing there were some things in the novel that didn't work quite as well for me