The author makes it clear exactly where these prohibitions came from. Plantation society was rigidly hierarchical. The only permissible path upward for hard-working, ambitious African Americans was indirect. A meteoric rise, or too obvious an appearance of prosperity, would be swiftly punished. To enable the slow but steady advance of their clan, the black women of Cane River plot, plead, deceive and manipulate their way through history, extracting crucial gifts of money and property along the way.

In her introduction, Tademy explains that as a young woman she failed to appreciate the love and reverence with which her mother and her four uncles spoke of their lively Grandma 'Tite (short for "Mademoiselle Petite"). She resented her great-grandmother's skin-colour biases, which were as much a part of Tademy's memory as were her great-grandmother's trademark dance moves. But the old stories haunted the author, and armed with a couple of pages of history compiled by a distant Louisiana cousin, she began to piece together a genealogy. The result? Tademy eventually left her position as vice president of a Fortune-500 company and set to work on Cane River, in which she has deftly and movingly reconstructed the world of her ancestors. --Regina Marler, Amazon.com

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Compelling from start to finish   January 17, 2004
 5 out of 5 found this review helpful

This is one of the most haunting books I have ever read. I picked it up in LAx whilst waiting for a delayed flight. I started reading it right away and did not put it down until I'd finished it (meaning that I lost almost 2 nights of sleep).
It is absolutely riveting, and simply the best book I have ever read.
Tademy's ability to give life to her characters is outstanding.
I'd definitely reccomend it to anyone who wants to indulge in a perfectly magical roller coaster of emotions.


Cane River marks an epoch in the chronicling of slavery.   August 7, 2002
 7 out of 7 found this review helpful

This book tells the story of four inspirational and real women who just happened to be slaves. So while the story is not exclusively about slavery, it illustrates in a heartwarming as well as heartbreaking way, the manner in which this condition colours their lives and ambitions without stripping them ultimately of their true essence. If anything, the struggles and the pain and the rapes emphasise the true and steely nature of these women of colour, called negroes or black as a race but according to Tademy, encompassing a spectrum from 'milk white to caramel'.This story paints a clear and compelling picture about many things but especially about this: a woman's struggle in life is a different on from that of a man's, but a woman struggle during slavery is truly a unique though heartrending one.
What really sets Tademy's book apart is the continuity within a family of slaves who are shaped and moulded and driven in many a case by their womenfolk, and it is passing interesting and instructive to note the way they themselves developed prejudices - among their own kind!
You've read Roots and other books within that genre or perhaps you haven't. In either case, Tademy's is not a work not to be taken lightly. It is a monarch amongst books of any kind and you will feel real gratitude that she researched her family and brought home her family to you in such a real way.