Status Updates From Hagar's Daughter

who da hell are all of u

hagar no 💔

OMFG HOW DID I NOT SEE THAT COMING AHHHHHHHH

melodramas are freakin awesome!!!!!!!!!!

I’m really caught up in this. Hopkins is a good hand at pacing these romances. In Contending Forces, she didn’t milk the drama but had Sappho tell Will everything straightaway once Langley tried to blackmail her. Now that the snare is around Cuthbert, Jewel is firmly on his side while the drama of the murder trial (and private investigation) bear out.

Also, I’m guessing that Senator Bowen was poisoned, too!!!

OH GOD I JUST REALIZED THAT HAGAR PROBABLY RECOGNIZED ENSON BUT SHE CANT SAY ANYTHING AGAINST HIM WITHOUT HAVING TO EXPLAIN WHY SHE KNOWS HIM AS A HORRIBLE SON OF A BITCH WHICH WOULD INVOLVE EXPLAINING HER HERITAGE AND IT ALREADY BURNED HER ONCE. HER INTERNALIZED SOUTHERN CASTE PREJUDICE IS ROBBING HER OF HER AGENCY. THIS IS GONNA GET SO FREAKIN MESSY

As a romance, this works, because I’m pissed at the 50 yr old barely disguised St. Clair’s Enson busting up Jewel’s engagement to Cuthbert so that he can marry her, by way of using Aurelia, Cuthbert’s one-time fiancée.

Given the format, I’m 99% sure that Mrs. Bowen is Hagar, and Aurelia is her daughter, the two having been separated from when she jumped into the river during her escape.

We have an echo of the scene-setting drama that began Contending Forces: a woman’s wealthy, slave-owning husband is murdered and she, along with her child, are slated to be sold into bondage due to her parentage. In this case, her African ancestry is a surprise to her and her husband, but Ellis Enson was too moral a man (for a slaveholder) to revile his beloved. Which is why his brother had to stage a suicide.

Meanwhile, all the supposedly dead people are alive and it’s pretty clear who they all are, it’s just a bit mystifying how they ended up in the positions that they are currently in, but I suppose all will be revealed.

There were already a number of times when I had to go looking for a chunk of text that I could tell was missing from the jumbled fragments left behind, which I would be able to find by checking the book online. Those served no purpose and I’m sure were just bad copy, but now I see there’s been a lot of deliberate rewriting by someone trying to “clean up” the dialect anytime the black characters speak. e_e

Anyone reading this book should steer clear of the edition by The X Press - they have a cool name, but they’ve tampered with with the original text quite a bit, and failed to acknowledge doing so in the process.