Social Realism

I went into this book essentially blind and became very pleasantly surprised. It centers around a black woman, Dana, from the 1970s who several times gets transported back in time to a farm in the antebellum south. It is written as a memoir, and its strength lies in re-living the slavery on such a farm from the eyes of a (at the time of writing) modern woman.

This book follows the poor orphan Oliver Twist, who is born and raised at a communal workhouse, and after escaping to London, involuntarily gets involved in the criminal world. One of its main messages is how terribly the poor are treated, seen by the upper classes as lazy slobs who don't want to work.