On a recent visit to her hometown, Perkins-Valdez sat for an interview for the WYPL-FM program “Book Talk.” As the novel unfolds, all three find themselves heading to Chicago and a new life. The story has three protagonists: Madge, who was raised by a family of root doctors in Tennessee as a free woman of color Hemp, who was a slave in Kentucky and is now searching for his wife and her daughter and Sadie, a young white widow from York, Pennsylvania, who begins communicating with the dead. “Balm,” which was released last month, looks not at the soldiers’ suffering but at the pain of widows, former slaves and others. The book chronicles the Civil War’s legacy of death and destruction, and Perkins-Valdez decided her next novel should investigate the possibilities of healing the personal and national trauma caused by the war. Then she read “This Republic of Suffering” by Harvard president and historian Drew Gilpin-Faust. Afraid of being pigeonholed following the success of her 2010 New York Times best-selling antebellum novel, “Wench,” Memphis native Dolen Perkins-Valdez had no desire to write another historical book.
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