The Healing

Gran Gran Satterfield was born a slave and learned to be a healer and midwife at her master's command. By the 1930s, Gran Gran is alone, her doctoring services rarely in demand. When a newly orphaned girl is left on her doorstep badly in need of healing, the old woman begins to remember her past. Adenrele Ojo's mesmerizing narration is perfectly suited to this complex novel about the interplay among remembering, storytelling, self-identity, and freedom. Through slight shifts of tone and accent, Ojo differentiates Gran Gran's narration from characters' dialogue and infuses her reading with a welcome level of drama. Listeners are treated to a fascinating author's note, which includes a recorded interview with an elderly black midwife who talks about traditional methods of childbirth. C.B.L. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

October 3, 2011
Bringing exciting verisimilitude to an overworked genre, this Southern saga from Odell (The View from Delphi) is rich in character and incident, but suffers from an awkward generation-bridging flashback structure. In the 1930s, elderly former slave Granada—a longtime midwife and healer—lives in the old kitchen of the once-imposing Satterfield Plantation and takes in Violet, a terrified seven-year-old. To soothe the girl’s nerves and to explain the legion of mysterious clay masks that fill the dilapidated mansion, Granada tells stories about her past, launching a series of vividly imagined, but momentum-destroying, scenes of pre–Civil War plantation life. As a young girl, Granada first served Amanda Satterfield (the opium-addled plantation mistress) as a house servant, plaything, and instrument to embarrass her husband. After the arrival of Polly Shine—a healer purchased to treat the slaves—Granada is banished from the big house and sent as a reluctant apprentice to Polly’s four-room hospital. The relationship between the two women evolves in predictable but engaging fashion. Despite the novel’s nuanced characters, Odell insists on uniting the two time lines with a hokey stab at significance toward the end. Had Odell allowed his vibrant characters to guide the narrative, rather than relying on a clichéd plot structure, this might have been a small Southern masterpiece.