The Invention of Wings Background

The Invention of Wings is a historical fiction novel written by Sue Monk Kidd. It was published on January 7, 2014. Kidd is an American author, and the author of the celebrated book The Secret Life of Bees.

The novel talks about a girl called Sarah who is raised in a Southern environment. The community she lives in owns slaves and does not give women their full rights. Sarah gets a slave as a gift for her birthday one day, and her life changes. The slave is called Hetty. Sarah makes very good friends with Hetty and teaches her writing and reading, but this is forbidden. So, when her parents know, they punish both of them. The novel continues to show the troubles Sarah and Hetty go through. Sarah goes through an identity crisis and Hetty is still a slave.

Kidd was inspired to write the story from the Grimke sisters and one of the characters is named Sarah Grimke, one of the sisters. She particularly chose them as the people to portray the story because they came from the same place she was raised in, South Carolina. Kidd says in an interview: "I first came upon the Grimké sisters in 2007 while visiting Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in New York."

The Invention of Wings, like most of Kidd's works, received many positive reviews from famous critics and magazines. Kirkus reviews said in its book review: "Kidd’s portrait of white slave-owning Southerners is all the more harrowing for showing them as morally complicated." Anita Sethi from The Guardian wrote: "In a world beset by modern-day slavery, this is a resonant, illuminating novel. It is a story about searching for a voice to express inexpressible pain. Handful's 'slave tongue' dialect is filled with hurt, longing and defiance, while Sarah, who struggles with speech...". Lastly, it received a 4.2 out of a 5-star rating on Goodreads, and one of the members who rated it 5stars wrote: "... it isn't until we confront a depiction of it that seems so real and horrible, that we realize how very little we really know of the injustice of slavery. Sue Monk Kidd has provided that depiction in this amazing novel."