Balm

Summary (from the publisher): The Civil War has ended, and Madge, Sadie, and Hemp have each come to Chicago in search of a new life.

Born with magical hands, Madge has the power to discern others’ suffering, but she cannot heal her own damaged heart. To mend herself and help those in need, she must return to Tennessee to face the women healers who rejected her as a child.

Sadie can commune with the dead, but until she makes peace with her father, she, too, cannot fully engage her gift.

Searching for his missing family, Hemp arrives in this northern city that shimmers with possibility. But redemption cannot be possible until he is reunited with those taken from him.

In the bitter aftermath of a terrible, bloody war, as a divided nation tries to come together once again, Madge, Sadie, and Hemp will be caught up in a desperate, unexpected battle for survival in a community desperate to lay the pain of the past to rest.

Beautiful in its historical atmosphere and emotional depth, Balm is a stirring novel of love, loss, hope, and reconciliation set during one of the most critical periods in American history.

 

Review: I received an advance reader's edition of this book from HarperCollins.

 

Where her first novel, Wench, was about the tragedy of the Civil War for those living through it, Balm is about the slow process of recovery after the war and "how the war was the vehicle through which we found our voice as a nation." This novel focuses on three individuals that are end up in Chicago at the end of the war and whose lives intersect. Madge was raised a free black by three sisters who healed from a living. Sadie finds herself a wealthy white widow after her stranger of a husband suddenly dies after their wedding. And Hemp is a freed slave who has been separated from his wife and looks to begin his life as a freedman in Chicago.

 

All three lives have been irrevocably altered by the war. For instance, Sadie, after trying to accept a marriage she didn't want, finds herself alone in a strange city; "her only future had a corpse in it, and all she could do was stare at his grotesque face as she scrambled to pose the questions she'd planned to ask" (7). Yet Sadie soon finds an alternate path when the spirit of a soldier killed in the war begins to communicate with her. Sadie becomes a medium, appealing to the many grieving lost loved ones. Meanwhile, Madge, employed as a servant in Sadie's home, grows her healing abilities and her ability to diagnose and heal through touch. And Hemp faces the daunting prospect of accepting that he may never find his living wife, but must find a way to create a new life without her.

 

The fragility of life is overwhelmingly present throughout the novel. "Even in this free world, white men handled his fate as loosely as seeds thrown into a dirt row" (74). All three main characters seem acutely aware of the fact that in a single moment their fates may change and the path of their life may take an abrupt turn. But over the course of the novel, all three characters maintain their resolve to carve their own path to the extent possible, to retain control that was previously denied them. This novel is also about the tenacity of hope, of the possibility for healing even after unimaginable destruction. "In a land so devastated by death, the best healing balm was hope" (260).

 

Perkins-Valdez has done an excellent job of recreating the world of Chicago in the aftermath of the Civil War. The character experience the bitter cold and winds of the city; "Sometimes, it shoved her so brutally that she skipped a step. It was like being birthed all over again" (15). The sense of confusion and misplaced persons teeming within the great city is also felt as Hemp tries and fails to find his wife. In many ways the three main characters are on the same journey of healing and claiming of their own story, yet in other ways their experiences seemed so disparate and disconnected, just three stories in the sea of those who survived the war.

 

Stars: 4