The Indigo Girl by Natasha Boyd (✰✰✰✰✰)

At only sixteen, Eliza Lucas is put in charge of her family’s faltering American plantations in South Carolina while her father travels to the Caribbean to attempt to salvage the family’s fortunes on their holdings there. Set in 1739, Eliza battles not only paternalism and misogyny but also the British and the Spanish. Uninterested in marriage, Eliza, despite the tremendous pressure it puts on her young shoulders, gamely picks up the baton and rallies her family, friends, and slaves in an attempt to preserve not only their livelihood but the fabric that holds all of their lives together. 

The novel explores themes of feminism, friendship, racism, master/slave relations, education, and plantation culture. Eliza was an early precursor of the Southern women who would hold together the plantation, slave-based economy of the South while the men went off to fight in the Civil War, only to be expected to step aside once the men returned. 

Based on a real woman, Eliza Lucas is the center that holds the novel together. She is mentally agile and unafraid to step up when her family needs her. Thinking outside the box, she chooses the as yet untried indigo plant and the dye it produces as the vehicle with which to save her family. Drawing strength from some characters and thwarted by others, Eliza’s hands-on zest for her endeavor lends tension to what otherwise might be a slow-paced read.

I absolutely loved this novel. It was rooted in characters without being slowed down by their development. It also avoided a lot of the stereotypical characters that are so common in Southern plantation literature. The science of indigo was lightly woven into the tale, giving a perfect balance of information and plot development. The one weakness was that historical happenings off the plantation with the British and Spanish were a bit too underrepresented. 

I listened to the audio version, marvelously narrated by Saskia Maarleveld. Her interpretation took an already lovely novel and brought it to a whole new level.