{"id":64122,"date":"2023-01-27T19:49:33","date_gmt":"2023-01-27T19:49:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=64122"},"modified":"2023-01-27T19:49:34","modified_gmt":"2023-01-27T19:49:34","slug":"what-passes-as-love-a-novel-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=64122","title":{"rendered":"What Passes as Love: A Novel (Review)<\/strong><\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

What Passes as Love: A Novel (Review)<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Washington Independent Review of Books<\/a>
\n2021-08-31<\/p>\n

Gis\u00e8le Lewis<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Thomas, Trisha R., What Passes as Love: A Novel<\/em><\/a> (Seattle: Lake Union Publishing, 2021)<\/strong><\/p>\n

An escaped slave navigates the white world in a suspenseful bid for freedom.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Trisha R. Thomas<\/a>, best known for her successful Nappily Ever After<\/em> series, offers now an historical novel about a Black woman passing as white in 1850s Virginia. In What Passes as Love<\/em><\/a>, Dahlia is the light-skinned daughter of Lewis Holt, a wealthy white plantation owner. She is also his slave, one of nearly a dozen he has fathered with his Black laborers.<\/p>\n

Thanks to her beauty, Dahlia is brought by Holt into the mansion to live and serve as a ladies\u2019 maid for her spoiled white half-sisters. Caught between guilt over the preferential treatment she receives and petty jealousy from her masters, Dahlia yearns for a better existence. Suddenly, the chance for one appears.<\/p>\n

During an outing to town on her 16th birthday, she is mistaken for white by a young man. When he abruptly proposes marriage that very afternoon, she embraces the opportunity to escape slavery without questioning his motives. But once installed as lady of the manor \u2014 under the name Lily Dove \u2014 at her new husband\u2019s plantation, maintaining the lie about her parentage becomes a matter of life and death. Dahlia\u2019s new mother-in-law analyzes her every move, her rogue brother-in-law wants her for himself, and the slaves who suspect her runaway status use her secret as blackmail…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An escaped slave navigates the white world in a suspenseful bid for freedom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,8,6940,20,693],"tags":[33730,32005,10964],"class_list":["post-64122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-slavery","category-usa","category-virginia","tag-gisele-lewis","tag-trisha-r-thomas","tag-washington-independent-review-of-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64123,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64122\/revisions\/64123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}