Let Us Descend, by Jesmyn Ward

Let Us Descend is a novel that starts out as realistic historical fiction, but when Annis’s mother tells her that there are spirits all around, the reader should pay attention, because those spirits will come to play an essential role later in the story, as the genre shifts more into magic realism.

Annis is an enslaved young girl growing up on the Carolina plantation owned by the man who raped her mother and fathered Annis. As she goes about her work, Annis overhears the lessons being given to her white half-sisters in the big house, and latches onto the lines she hears recited from Dante’s Inferno. Hence the title: Let Us Descend. The novel that makes effective use of a descent-into-hell motif as Annis’s young life, already difficult when we meet her, sinks lower and lower until she experiences the worst conditions possible for an enslaved person — and seeks the help of powers beyond the human realm to try to escape and find freedom. There’s tremendous darkness and evil in this story but also an insistent strain of hope and resilience. Beautifully written, often difficult to read, but well worth the intellectual and emotional investment.