Overview

Kidnapped along with her brother Ledu (Olaudah Equiano) at the tender age of eleven, Olu is dragged across Nigeria, deposited on a slave ship for the Middle Passage, and dropped on a rice plantation in Charles Town, South Carolina in 1753. During the Revolutionary War she attempts to escape. Will she succeed? Will she reunite with any of her family members? Joanna Vassa (daughter of Equiano) is introduced to William Wilberforce and the abolition movement when she is eleven. A biracial orphan, Joanna is raised by her guardian, and while away at boarding school she encounters racist attitudes and struggles to make friends. She seeks information about her Aunt Olu. Will they ever meet? Remnant is a bildungsroman about two young women of color striving to carve out meaningful lives despite monumental obstacles. Will a family separated by slavery ever be reunited?

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Reviews

"""So little information survives about Joanna Vassa, the mixed-race daughter of eighteenth-century Black abolitionist and bestselling author Olaudah Equiano. In her fine novel Remnant, author Katie Sweeting fills in the blanks about Joanna and her extended family, imagining what their experiences might have been in early nineteenth-century England. Sweeting's vivid, moving work of historical fiction is a gift to readers in its conjuring up of the Equiano family's remarkable, long-forgotten women."" --Devoney Looser, regents professor of English, Arizona State University ""Inspired by Olaudah Equiano's autobiography, novelist Katie Sweeting uses the power of imagination to innovatively create in Remnant the voices and lives of Equiano's sister and daughter hidden from us by the historical record."" --Vincent Carretta, author of Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man ""It was a pleasure for me to have supported the author's research for this book when she visited the United Kingdom. She and I followed Joanna Vassa Bromley's footsteps and gathered the facts which are incorporated into the narrative. The book is well-written and deserves to be in every home, school, and library."" --Arthur Torrington, co-founder and president, The Equiano Society ""In Remnant, gifted novelist Katie Sweeting powerfully dramatizes the interconnected stories of two Black women surviving the evils of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. A most welcome achievement."" --Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Fat Time and Other Stories"

Author Information

Katie Sweeting is professor of English at Hudson County Community College. She is the coauthor of The Power of a City at Prayer (2002). In spring 2022 she taught creative writing at Fergusson College in Pune, India as a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar. She has studied and taught about Olaudah Equiano for fifteen years.

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