In the 1850s, a lawyer named Elias Drake opened a resort in Ohio called Tawawa. It was frequented by northern and southern guests alike, who came to the resort to take the healing waters found in area springs. The southerners brought groups of slaves with them, although, as an Ohio historical marker notes, the presence of these slave entourages unsettled many antislavery locals. In her debut novel, Wench, Dolen Perkins-Valdez takes us to Tawawa, focusing not on antislavery Ohioans, but on four female slaves—Lizzie, Mawu, Sweet, and Reenie—whose masters bring them annually from Tennessee and Louisiana to the springs. (Of course, for enslaved women, this wasn't a vacation—while at Tawawa, they cooked, and cleaned, and had sex with their masters.)

The novel is about the women's friendship, and it is about slavery—about how slavery shapes and delimits every aspect of their lives (including friendship), and about how Lizzie, Mawu, Sweet and Reenie go about carving out space and finding sanity while in slavery's grip. Much of the novel's emotional punch comes from Lizzie and Mawu's uneasy friendship: Lizzie has actually fallen in love with her master, and believes, at least for a while, that he loves her; Mawu, by contrast, submits to her master's rape kicking and screaming. Mawu wants to escape to freedom; Lizzie can't imagine leaving her son and daughter. Along the way, Dolen-Valdez also offers psychologically astute portraits of the supporting cast: a planter's wife, trying to cope with her husband's preference for his comely slave; an anti-slavery Quaker woman whose husband is not too keen about her tentative friendship with the enslaved women of Tawawa.

With its obscure, compelling historical setting and four subtly developed main characters, this novel is simply remarkable. A southern historian remarked to me that Toni Morrison's Beloved is the kind of truth great writers can tell when they aren't bound by footnotes; the same can be said of Wench.

Lauren Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School.

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