Betsy Randall, a young wife and mother, journeys with her family from their 18th Century English home across the Atlantic, bound for her late brother’s plantation in Colonial Virginia. At the end of a tragic voyage, she is unexpectedly alone in a land where Europeans, Africans, and Indians are becoming a nation. Betsy has few choices but resolves to claim her inheritance. Forging a way in this new world, she encounters the kindness and treachery of colonials; the bravery and violence of frontiersman, soldiers, bandits and Indians; the beauty and danger of the untamed wilderness; the cruelty of slavery, and the sometimes strange intimacy between slave and master.
Betsy Randall's journey from England to Colonial Virginia is a bone-rattling, eye-opening voyage across the Atlantic to her brother's plantation--a place he described as "paradise." There, slavery forms a nightmarish counterpoint to the bonds of sisterhood that develop between Betsy and her brother's slave, Deborah. Lois Barliant is a terrifically gifted writer who knows this world to bedrock, and One Day's Tale is a spectacular act of the imagination--by turns lush and terrifying, it's a celebration of the love that liberates and an indictment of the institutional racism and violence that continues to haunt our present
Set near the beginning of the 18th century, this debut novel introduces the resilient and compassionate Betsy Randall. Aboard a ship bound for her brother Robert’s tobacco farm and estate in Virginia, she is joined by her husband, Isaac, and their three young children. While she’s uncertain if their trip from England is an advisable one, her trepidations are quickly replaced with horror ... Barliant is a deft, unsentimental writer, and scenes are portrayed with unflinching tenor. … It’s a complicated, engaging and ultimately moving narrative … [t]he writing is assured and affecting, and Barliant does fine work exploring this troubled era without becoming bogged down in its details.
