Lazaretto

January 4, 2016
Setting her book once again in her native city of Philadelphia, Pa., McKinney-Whetstone opens her sixth novel on the eve of Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Meda, a beautiful young black woman, delivers the secret child of her employer, lawyer Tom Benin (who is white), at a medical office for clandestine services. After the baby is taken from her at birth, Sylvie, an apprentice to the midwife, lies and tells Meda her infant girl has died. Bereft and ungrounded, Meda seeks consolation by serving as a wet nurse to a pair of white newborn boys at a nearby orphanage, naming them Bram and Linc after the slain president she admired. Through a deal with Benin, Bram and Linc are able to stay with Meda on weekends and holidays. After cruelty and abuse from their employer forces the boys from Philadelphia, Meda and her family continue to treat them as their own. In the meantime, Sylvia has become a formidable and capable nurse at the city's island quarantine hospital, Lazaretto. When the boys return to the city in desperate circumstances, old paths eventually converge at the hospital. McKinney-Whetstone explores racial passing, class prejudice, the nature of family, and the longings of forbidden love, but the disjointed narratives often feel like two separate novels uncomfortably forced together. The emotional content is never allowed to rise above predictable contrivances of plot and unremarkable characterizations.

February 15, 2016

From the moment Sylvia, a nurse-in-training, delivers Meda's baby and lies that the baby (fathered by her white employer) died, the two African American women remain connected through the years, although they belong to different social circles. The light-skinned baby, named Linc after the just-assassinated President Lincoln, is secretly delivered to an orphanage, where a grieving Meda cares for him and another orphaned infant, Bram. Raised as impoverished whites, Linc and Bram grow up among African Americans whose lives appear full of love which, as outsiders, the boys don't feel entitled to themselves. In the climactic second half of the novel, the various story lines come together in a tragicomic series of events at Lazaretto--the city's quarantine hospital out on an island, where Sylvia lives and works--including a life-threatening gunshot wound, a wedding, bounty hunters, as well as love lost and found. VERDICT Themes of racial and family identity are threaded into the author's (Trading Dreams at Midnight) fast-paced historical about the connected lives of working African Americans in Philadelphia in the years after the Civil War. [See Prepub Alert, 10/19/15.]--Laurie Cavanaugh, Holmes P.L., Halifax, MA

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2016
McKinney-Whetstone's sixth novel (Trading Dreams at Midnight, 2008, etc.) explores a fateful shooting that rocks the close-knit African-American community surrounding the Lazaretto Hospital in post-Civil War Philadelphia. On the night of Lincoln's assassination, a black maid named Meda is rushed to the office of local midwife Dr. Miss by Tom Benin, her white boss and father of her child. It's the first birth that Sylvia, the assisting nurse-in-training, has attended. So when Benin tells Dr. Miss that he'll be taking the baby and Meda must be told the baby has died, Sylvia is understandably shaken. The question of who can retain control over his or her own body becomes central to the narrative. As one of the few doctors serving blacks in 1865, Dr. Miss was able to provide much-needed health care for the community as well as training for aspiring black nurses like Sylvia; however, the hierarchy of racial power dynamics still permeated every aspect of their work. In haunting, vivid language, Meda's breasts overflow with milk as she mourns the newborn she was never able to hold in her arms. Language sings throughout the whole of McKinney-Whetstone's writing--from the lilt of her characters' colloquial speech to her poetic, visceral descriptions. Meda's and Sylvia's lives continue to intertwine through their roles as surrogate mothers--Meda to Lincoln and Abraham, two orphaned boys Benin sends her to look after; Sylvia to her cousin Vergie. But after Lincoln and Abraham are assaulted by a powerful man and forced to flee Philadelphia, all these lives intersect when a quarantine shuts down Lazaretto Hospital and decades-old secrets finally come to light. A sophisticated and compelling novel that comes alive through a rich cavalcade of vibrant characters and a suspenseful plot.

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