February 2011 Review – Voyage of Promise

Voyage of Promise

Grace in Africa Series – #2

By Kay Marshall Strom

History matters. Not just the dates and the what-happened facts. Not just the famous names who made their marks on important documents. Ordinary people also contributed to our history—people who saw the need for change, who stood for justice when it wasn’t popular to do so, who never gave up the cause for freedom. Kay Marshall Strom draws wonderful word pictures of people like these in her Grace in Africa series. Yes, of course her characters are fictional—but they are born out of painstaking research, out of passion, and out of a desire to communicate present-day conditions through stories of past struggles. 

The second book in the Grace in Africa series, Voyage of Promise, gives the reader an almost too-close experience on board a slave ship bound for England in the late 1700s. Being in the mind and heart of a man living this horror will change you. Our story’s heroine, Grace Winslow—the estranged daughter of an African princess and a British slave ship owner—believes she will be reunited with Cabeto, her African husband, in London and live a life of happiness together, in spite of the murder of their son and being ripped away from all they knew and loved in Africa. Little does she know her husband is bound for the Americas—and no one in London, not even her own father, is interested in helping her. She unknowingly becomes embroiled in an unpopular anti-slavery movement, which turns sour and puts her in harms way—a place she has become rather used to. Grace is determined, resourceful—and, yes, sometimes impulsive and foolhardy. But she represents what is best in those who truly care about making a difference in our world. And she believes that she, like the biblical Queen Esther, was born “for such a time as this.”

 If you love historical fiction, you will love this series. Be prepared to care again—to learn something—and to lose yourself in another place and time, at least for a few hours. Kay Marshall Strom never disappoints.