74. The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate

listened to audio borrowed from Bosler Library
narrated by Sophie Amoss, Sullivan Jones, Robin Miles, Bahni Turpin, Lisa Flanagan, Dominic Hoffman
Unabridged audio (15:16)
2020 Ballantine Books
388 pgs.
HistFiction told in two voices during two time periods
Finished 5/8/2020
Goodreads rating:   4.26 - 9918 ratings
My rating: 4.5
Setting: Louisiana, 1875 & 1987

First line/s: "A single ladybug lands featherlight on the teacher's finger, clings there, a living gemstone."

My comments:  Another book that has wowed me.  Based on the actual "book of lost friends," which were advertisements in the late 19th century posted by freed slaves looking for lost family members.  Told in two voices during two times periods, 1875 and 1987, and set in rural Louisiana, Hattie and Benny tell their tales.  Hattie is a freed slave, sharecropping on the same land where her family was enslaved, who ends up going on an adventurous journey trying to save the two daughters of the manor; half-sisters; one a miserable spoiled brat and the other a half Creole from New Orleans who was, of course, despised by her sister and her sister's mother.  Benny is a still wet-behind-the-ears brand new teacher who's landed a job in the "poor" school in the same town/locale as Hattie had lived.  A bibliophile, she has no books for her students, respect from her students, and no support from anyone local except the heir of the manor, who wants nothing to do with it or his uncles who run the town.  Benny, with the help of some of the town's African-American elders, gets the kids interested in their history, researching, learning, and starting to care about their roots.  Each chapter begins with an actual advertisement from the book of lost friends. I give it a 4.5 only because I think it start out a it slowly and didn't grab me 'til a bit of the way in.

Goodreads synopsis:  A new novel inspired by historical events: a story of three young women on a journey in search of family amidst the destruction of the post-Civil War South, and of a modern-day teacher who rediscovers their story and its connection to her own students' lives.
          Lisa Wingate brings to life stories from actual "Lost Friends" advertisements that appeared in Southern newspapers after the Civil War, as freed slaves desperately searched for loved ones who had been sold off.
          Louisiana, 1875 In the tumultuous aftermath of Reconstruction, three young women set off as unwilling companions on a perilous quest: Lavinia, the pampered heir to a now-destitute plantation; Juneau Jane, her illegitimate free-born Creole half-sister; and Hannie, Lavinia's former slave. Each carries private wounds and powerful secrets as they head for Texas, following dangerous roads rife with ruthless vigilantes and soldiers still fighting a war lost a decade before. For Lavinia and Juneau Jane, the journey is one of inheritance and financial desperation, but for Hannie, torn from her mother and eight siblings before slavery's end, the pilgrimage westward reignites an agonizing question: Could her long-lost family still be out there? Beyond the swamps lie the seemingly limitless frontiers of Texas and, improbably, hope.
           Louisiana, 1987 For first-year teacher Benedetta Silva, a subsidized job at a poor rural school seems like the ticket to canceling her hefty student debt--until she lands in a tiny, out-of-step Mississippi River town. Augustine, Louisiana, seems suspicious of new ideas and new people, and Benny can scarcely comprehend the lives of her poverty-stricken students. But amid the gnarled oaks and run-down plantation homes lies the century-old history of three young women, a long-ago journey, and a hidden book that could change everything.