I was not able to get interested in this book and I did not finish it. The characters and the plot were not able to catch or keep my attention.

The concept of this story was very good but I feel that there were too many halts and unanswered questions in the writing. . I did appreciate reading about the flu pandemic as so much was similar to what we are going through now.
Many thanks to The Ardent Writer Press and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

Anne Aletha is the story of a girl who goes to take care of her late uncle’s farm in the early 1900s while her brother is off fighting in WW1.

I struggled to connect with the characters. I they were all flat and not very well developed. Anne Aletha encounters racism and the KKK in this small town and is outraged, but that storyline seemed to go nowhere. She is attracted, I guess, to someone and has a sexual encounter, but that storyline goes nowhere. The most interesting part was the flu epidemic that hit the town, probably because of the pandemic we are going through now. The characters did not really grow or change, and I truly do not know the point of this story. I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley. My review is voluntary.

Anne Aletha
by Camille N Wright
Description:
“Meet Anne Aletha, who fought for equality for all … in 1918. Amid World War I, the Spanish Influenza, and a re-emerging Ku Klux Klan, a young unconventional schoolteacher inherits her uncle’s farm in the Deep South with the intentions of opening a school to educate all children—rich or poor, black or white. Her ambitions and her courage to challenge the systematic racial injustice she witnesses daily plunge herself and those she loves into the violence of the Klan.”
I was expecting a lot more depth from this story. Having read the description I guess I focused on the promised KKK aspect and thought I’d read more about that, but it was a small part of the story and basically consisted of Anne Aletha of standing up and walking out of church.
Overall, I found the story to be very superficial and I wasn’t very engaged with the heroine. She had high ideals that were not realistic for the era and were not presented with any depth. The violence she experienced was not written about in such a way as to make me tense and worry for her safety. The most engaging section of the story was the writing about the Spanish Influenza. This most likely hit home because I can relate to it at this time of the Coronavirus pandemic.
If not for the unnecessary “love” scenes, I would have thought this a book was written for a middle grade or perhaps a high school reader of historical fiction.
My score for Anne Aletha is 2 of 5 shots.

Rather disappointing. The story of a pretty naive 23 year old woman who travels to a small farm she's inheirited from her uncle in 1918, with the intent of returning it to profitability as well as teaching the local children, both black and white. There is good writing here, evoking the time and place--particularly in terms of several "how it's done" sequences--how to make lye soap for instance, but there are a few 20-buck words sprinkied in unnecessarily as well. While the story purports to be about Anne Aletha standing up to the racism that permeates this Georgia community, the historically-based lynchings that occur near the start of the book happen off the page, and, sadly, the Afriucan-American characters are largely just placeholders rather than fully developed. And, of course, the elephant in the manuscript: yet aother story of US racism and brutalties from the point-of-view of a white character. Not that it *couldn't* work, it just doesn't here. World War I and the flu pandemic are mostly used to demonstrate how stalwart Anne Aletha is meant to be. Oh, and kinda unbelievable obligatory sexual encounter is thrown in as well and quickly dispensed with.

So, not a sucess for me.

A copy of this book was provided for free from the publisher through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.