This is the imagined story of a fascinating life - Harriet is the daughter of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. When she reaches adulthood, she decides to move to Pennsylvania and pass as a white woman, supposedly an orphan. She falls in deeply in love, marries, and has children, but is haunted by the secret that she cannot tell anyone. On the one hand, the costs of denying one's identity, and all one's relatives, is high. On the other, she achieves a very successful life, one that her talents entitle her to, but which she would be denied by prejudice.

I was somewhat disappointed in this book, after reading Sally Hemings. This book is more consciously "literary.' At one point, Harriet loses her fingerprints in an acid spill -- a symbol that we are hit over the head with. Some of the characters seem to be more types and symbols that real people: Sally Hemings's odd, oracular farewell (forever!) to her daughter, the ghostlike character who turns out to be Sally's niece.

The book is also excessively didactic, in my opinion. I wish that Chase-Riboud had left the question of whether or not Harriet chose well a bit more open and left the reader to ponder the matter. I really wonder if Harriet would have found it relatively easy to pass in the beginning and so difficult later on. She only considers her own feelings: would she not sometimes think it was worth it given the privilege that it gave her children?

One odd detail that got on my nerves: Chase-Riboud goes on and on (and on) about white people dancing to the tune about Gabriel Prosser when they don't know the words. She doesn't give us the music, but the words sound like a variant of the tune that I know as The Escape of Old John Webb. (The three syllables of "Old John Webb" actually fit better than the five of "Gabriel Prosser.") So maybe they did know the words, or at least one set of them.

Still, it was interesting, and those who enjoyed Sally Hemings will probably want to see the follow-up. ( )