All that She Carried by Tiya Miles

ALL THAT SHE CARRIED by Tiya Miles is subtitled “The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake.” For some reason, I pictured this as a companion to the award-winning Rachel Field’s Hitty: Her First One Hundred Years. No; ALL THAT SHE CARRIED is a non-fiction work written by a MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipient who is currently a professor of history at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The text is more scholarly and adult oriented, although it, too, uses an object to convey history: Rose gave the sack to her daughter, Ashley, in the 1850s when the then nine-year-old was sold to a different owner. Miles unflinchingly relates stories of slavery, family separation and connection, Reconstruction, and the Great Migration, focusing in part on a great-granddaughter who embroidered the sack with its story in the 1920s. ALL THAT SHE CARRIED received starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal (noting “YA crossover appeal”), and Publishers Weekly.  Read or listen to an excerpt on the publisher’s site.