Whew! This book was a real challenge to read. The story is heart-wrenching and beautiful--the love between the two main characters, young enslaved men in the antebellum South, was pure. And I appreciated the complexity of all the strong female characters. But the prose is so esoteric that I found it inaccessible. I frequently felt like I was missing what was going on, what the author was trying to convey. I would be interested to re-read this book with a literature class so that I could more fully appreciate it.