A Sitting in St. James

Written by Rita Williams-Garcia

Narrated by Machelle Williams

Winner of the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award!

7 starred reviews! ""Monumental."" —Booklist (starred review) * ""A marathon masterpiece.""—Kirkus (starred review) * ""Necessary.""—SLJ (starred review) * ""Shocking and dramatic.""—Shelf Awareness (starred review) * ""Mesmerizing, confounding and vividly rendered.""—Book Page (starred review) * ""Williams-Garcia’s storytelling is magnificent; her voice honest and authentic.""—Horn Book (starred review)

This astonishing novel from three-time National Book Award finalist Rita Williams-Garcia about the interwoven lives of those bound to a plantation in antebellum America is an epic masterwork—empathetic, brutal, and entirely human—and essential reading for both teens and adults grappling with the long history of American racism.

1860, Louisiana. After serving as mistress of Le Petit Cottage for more than six decades, Madame Sylvie Guilbert has decided, in spite of her family’s objections, to sit for a portrait.

While Madame plots her last hurrah, stories that span generations—from the big house to out in the fields—of routine horrors, secrets buried as deep as the family fortune, and the tangled bonds of descendants and enslaved, come to light to reveal a true portrait of the Guilberts.

Rita Williams-Garcia is one of the preeminent authors of our time. She has been honored with the Children's Literature Lecture Award from the American Library Association.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: May 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9780063090491

Rita Williams-Garcia

Rita Williams-Garcia's Newbery Honor Book, One Crazy Summer, was a winner of the Coretta Scott King Author Award, a National Book Award finalist, the recipient of the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and a New York Times bestseller. The two sequels, P.S. Be Eleven and Gone Crazy in Alabama, were both Coretta Scott King Author Award winners and ALA Notable Children’s Books. Her novel Clayton Byrd Goes Underground was a National Book Award finalist and winner of the NAACP Image Award for Youth/Teen Literature. Rita is also the author of five other distinguished novels for young adults: Jumped, a National Book Award finalist; No Laughter Here, Every Time a Rainbow Dies (a Publishers Weekly Best Children’s Book), Fast Talk on a Slow Track (all ALA Best Books for Young Adults); and Blue Tights. Rita Williams-Garcia lives in Jamaica, New York, with her husband and has two adult daughters. You can visit her online at ritawg.com.

Reviews for A Sitting in St. James

[AnaStacia Nicol Wright · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Amazing. As someone with shared creole and African American ancestry from St. James, amazing. Manifik Mam'zelle Rita, manifik.

It starts off slow and er- far, but I promise is worth the wait.

[Kai Spellmeier · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A fascinating historical novel, wonderfully researched, with complex characters and amazing writing. Also loved to see queer characters represented cause we know we’ve always been here but rarely get to see ourselves represented throughout history. Amazing narrator too.

[fromthecomfychair · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

First off, this book is a brilliant work of historical fiction. It thumbs its nose at Gone with the Wind by portraying slavery in all its cruelty and inhumanity. But it goes way further. It dares to imagine a different future for some of its characters, and I won't say more than this and spoil the ending. There are really a group of main characters besides the elderly plantation owner who is the subject of the sitting for a portrait. Madame Sylvie, daughter of a prominent French family in pre-Revolution France, is 80 years old when the story begins. She was rescued from the Revolution by a planter, Bayard Guilbert, and first brought to Haiti, and then to Louisiana. He has passed on by the time this story begins. Her life has been a series of cruel disappointments, losing many children to miscarriages. She has one grandson, Byron, on whom she is pinning her hopes of saving their reputation and their plantation, by wedding him to Eugenie. Unfortunately, Byron is gay, a fact he goes to great lengths to hide, both because of the shame it would bring on his family, and his own love of their traditional way of life.Madame Sylvie has a granddaughter who is half-black, Rosalie, whom she does not acknowledge. And then there is Thisbe, madame's body servant, who Madame named after Marie Antionette's dog. Thisbe does her duties with ears open and eyes downcast to avoid Madame's punishments. In spite of their poverty, Madame insists on sitting for her portrait, to be commissioned from a relative of Marie Vigee Le Brun, the famous portraitist of Marie Antionette. There is so much going on in this story, so many threads, all expertly woven together by Garcia-Williams. We learn about slaves, about offspring of white owners and their slaves, about freed blacks, and about the sin of homosexuality. This story rests, though, on its examination of the lengths the white plantation owners will go to in order to preserve their way of life. Can't recommend it highly enough, but it's definitely for adults and older teens.

[brangwinn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There are many books about the antebellum South, but none like this. Sylvie Bernardin de Maret Dacier Guilbert is the matriarch of a failing Louisiana plantation family. She dwells in her past and the friendship she had with the French aristocracy before the French Revolution. She even names her personal slave (servant is Madame Sylvie’s word) Thisbe after a favorite dog of the queen. She can’t stand the sight of her son’s mulatto daughter. But privilege is not enough to save the plantation from bankruptcy. While she frets about having her portrait painted by a painter who can trace his lineage back to a well-known French portraitist, her son is working on saving the plantation though the marriage of his gay son to a girl with a wealthy family. He also is working toward getting his mulatto daughter married to the bi-racial son of a neighboring planter. Drawing on her family’s history, author Rita Williams-Garcia has painted in words a portrait of the inhumanity and snobbery of the American slave owners.