Monticello - Sally Cabot Gunning - Bog

After the early death of her mother, young Martha Jefferson accompanied her father, Thomas Jefferson, on his first diplomatic mission to Paris. Five years later, father and daughter have come home to Monticello, the family's beloved plantation in the Virginia countryside. Though Monticello has suffered from her father's absence, Martha finds it essentially unchanged, even as she has been transformed. The sheltered girl who sailed to Europe is now a handsome seventeen-year-old woman with a battle-scarred heart who sees a world far more complicated than it once seemed. Martha has long abhorred slavery and yearned for its swift end. Yet she now discovers that the home she adores is burdened by growing debt and cannot survive long without the labor of its slaves. As her father returns to government, he becomes increasingly distracted by tumultuous fights for power and troubling attachments. And as Martha begins to pay closer attention to Sally Hemings?the beautiful light-skinned slave long acknowledged to be her mother's half-sister?she realizes that the slave's position in the household has subtly changed. Eager for distraction, Martha welcomes the attentions of Thomas Randolph, her exotic distant cousin, but soon she uncovers burdens and desires in him that threaten to compromise her own.