I hardly have words for how incredible this book is.

The illustrations are absolutely perfect. Beautifully done and intense in the black and white coloring, creative expressions, and incredible artistic renderings of the past colliding with the present.

The story and writing is equally amazing. The story is told through research so the past and present weave together to give the reader a complete picture. As a whole, it's inspiring, emotional, beautiful, and heart wrenching.

I have no criticism. I received a free ecopy of this book in exchange for my honest review, but I definitely still want to purchase a hardcopy for my shelves. Absolutely stunning and significant book!

At first when I started this book I was disappointed that it was more memoir than actual history and wondered if a graphic novel was really the place for this story to be told. A couple chapters in and I was blown away at how well the author and artist collaborated to make a truly gripping story about academic research. The scenes set in the present, which may have been less compelling on their own, come to life when the art melds the past and present with the additional benefit of further illuminating the continuity between the author and the women who she is trying to give their due. Hall also makes great points about the state of research in that women have been often excluded from slave revolt narratives based on assumptions about the female sex and not what the actual data provides as well as the institutional barriers when private companies are trying to shield their dark pasts.. Overall, a wonderful book, especially for those who are interested in history and academic research.

This book is half memoir and half history and I really loved it.

It is a really powerful graphic novel and it left me speechless. The author is also the protagonist and we follow her examination of numerous historical events that have been persistently eradicated and overlooked. The only thing that I did not like was the art style, it wasn't bad to say but it wasn't pleasing to the eye.

I thought this was extrememly well done. I love and read a lot of graphic novels, but I'm not particularly a big fan of some of the non-fiction works that are made in this format, as the imaging doesn't always add to the story. This was not the case with this graphic novel. I thought the artwork helped make the text and information more impactful. Very well done and a great introduction to a topic of history that I haven't really seen highlighted before.

This is part memoir of a historian and part history she uncovers. To some degree, it's narrative history, as there were limits on the information available, so the stories are filled in.

Presented as a graphic novel, it's quite brilliantly laid out to have the slave history reflected in the current day pages. However, it was sometimes hard to make out what was being depicted. It may have been the use of black and white only (no color) or the digital format. The author's emotional turmoil is also depicted many times, which feels repetitive and somewhat unnecessary (as the reader is likely feeling something similar.) Despite that, I think this is an important piece of the larger historical puzzle.

When I saw the title of this graphic novel I thought I would be reading a book about women led slave revolts not a memior. I understand that Rebecca Hall was also telling about her challenges faced while researching this topic but, it seemed to take away from the revolts.. I felt like she didn't spend a lot of time talking about them. I don't think graphic novel was the right format for this. I wish she would've written a short novel instead.

2.5 out of 5 stars

It was not until one year ago, when I read "Black Women's History of the United States," did I realize that women, especially Black women, are often left out of historic records. "Wake" made me realize that this is not only an American History problem, but this is a global history problem. As a Black woman, it was CRITICAL (yes, critical) for me to read this book. I wasn't completely sure what to expect, but the outline and order of this graphic novel kept me engaged from beginning to end. I literally read this is one setting (before school).

As an educator, I never want to find myself continuing to suppress the voices that the curriculum and history has already done. I read books like "Wake" to educate myself (and become inspired by someone else's research) and seek more information about those voices who have been silenced. I've always felt a calling that my voice would be used to impact others. While I'm here, my goal is to continue coming across books like "Wake," putting them in the hands of students, inspiring them to continue the research, and make a plan to travel to these places that holds the history and answers that I'm looking for.

Furthermore, I loved the flashbacks to the past as the research in the present unfolds. It's also not surprising that companies, officers, security, etc. would want to prevent this research and documents from being discovered. Nevertheless, we persist, we learn, and we educate.

***Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing me with an advanced eArc in exchange for my honest review.

Women warriors planned and led slave revolts on slave ships during the Middle Passage. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history.

This graphic novel tells the story of one woman’s quest to uncover their stories. But in the process, she learns that the power of resistance, buried in the past, is still very much alive.

Historian Dr. Rebecca Hall is driven by a sense of being haunted by the past. Her grandmother was born the property of Squire Sweeney in Howard County, Missouri in 1860. Though the standard history books insist that enslaved women were unsuited for planning or leading revolts, Rebecca keeps searching for the deeper stories. She learns from old court records, newspaper articles, captains’ logs of slave ships, insurance policies, correspondence, and even the bones of enslaved women from the “negro burying ground” uncovered in Manhattan.

She finds women warriors everywhere.

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts brings these women’s stories graphically to life.

Follow their stories into the slave ships during the Middle Passage, where women risked certain death in a final fight for their freedom. Follow them through the founding of New York City, in stories that radically reshape our notions of slavery’s role in the U.S. Follow Rebecca’s own story of resistance, as she faces the forces of white supremacy and patriarchy continuing to shape her own life -- both as a successful attorney and later as a historian seeking the past that haunts her.

The past is gone. But we still live in its wake. -Goodreads

Although I liked this novel, I feel that it would have better if it wasn't a graphic novel. The information displayed in the novel was heartbreaking and I wanted to know more. not necessarily about the author but the other stories she found because I can't believe it was just those mentioned in the novel.

I felt that there was a lot of things unsaid, which was the main point but in regards to the author's life, there was a whole lot of things unsaid. She hit a lot of walls and just seemed to let it go. That bothered me and I am really curious to know if she either continued to hit walls (more than likely) and what she did about them. Because the next historian that comes by is going to hit the same walls.

The novel was detailed and I loved how it transitioned into the different stories including the authors'. Again, I just feel this would have been better presented if it was not a graphic novel.

Overall, I enjoyed this while feeling really sad, disappointed and angry.

3 Pickles

Having read Wake, I found this title to be reminiscent of the feel of Maus, or George Takei's They Called Us Enemy.
A well-written balance of emotion and scholarly depth, this work shows both why the pursuit of 'hidden history' is needed and why it can be so painful, especially in today's polarizing, willfully ignorant world.
Informative and thought-provoking, Wake leads the reader down a journey of how slaves were viewed in the legal system and how the slave trade was run. Wake shows how those running and bankrolling the slave trade refuse to acknowledge their roles while the descendants of slaves have to grapple with this soul-crushing legacy.
Absolutely recommended for those who are willing to chase uncomfortable history, or gain a new perspective on the history they thought they knew.

Amazing job. This graphic novel mixes memoir with real historical events. This took me a few days to read due to the subject matter. Slavery is heavily whitewashed and pretty soon it won't be taught. I am so glad I came across this and decided to read this. I hope Rebecca Hall publishes more books, I am already a fan!

"Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts" follows Dr. Rebecca Hall as she tries to learn more about women-led slave revolts. The narrative focuses both on the stories Hall uncovers and Hall's journey itself, including the heavy emotional toll that this research takes. Hall does a fantastic job explaining how the historical record can perpetrate acts of violence by obscuring the efforts of enslaved people to fight for their freedom, particularly when those people are women. I learned a lot about specific revolts, how the historical record hides women's actions, and more about the mechanics of slavery.

Hugo Martínez' art does a fantastic job of driving home that this history is all around us and continues to shape life today, even if people try to ignore it. The art could be both surreal and harrowing. I did find it hard to make out what was happening in some panels, which could be due to the fact that I read an advanced copy. This didn't happen often, though.

"Wake" was an emotional and informative read about parts of history that can often be overlooked. The illustrations added another layer of nuance to the story to make for a reading experience that left me with a lot to think about.

This year my co-teachers and I are planning a graphic novel unit--I would like to advocate for this title to be included, or at least excerpts. The connection between the author/narrator and the content is clearly strong, and she writes with an empathy and strength that I don't see in many texts. The art also pairs well with the subject matter--this copy is black and white, and characters are drawn roughly--almost like muscles on skeletons instead of fully formed bodies. This style lends itself well to the text. Highly recommend!

If someone wants to know what writing a dissertation is like, this gives an idea. The material is important, but also the discussion of the trauma of history and the historians who uncover it. Although the historian in me cringed at a few parts (the interactions at archives in general and fragile archival material shattering!), I think this would be especially impactful when talking about what historians actually do while also talking about the material. My gears are already turning on crafting an assignment.

There was much less of women led slave revolts than I expected, but I'm sure that's Dr. Hall's monograph. I would have liked more of them, or an accompanying volume of them. That gets at the biggest thing here - it is too short for all of the things it tries to do. Each of those things is important and raises key issues, so it does make a great beginning of a story and conversation, but does little to resolve it.

Thank you to Rebecca Hall, Hugo Martinez, Simon & Schuster, and Netgalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy of this book.
This was kind of hard to read; the author put so much emotion into it that it didn't go down easily. But I don't think it was meant to at all; it SHOULD make us sorrowful. There was so much here I did not know, and it is the kind of stuff that we OUGHT to know, that we really can't move forward unless we try to understand. I liked the graphic format and illustrations, they seemed to fit the subject matter well. Very well done.

4.75 Stars
Content Warnings at end of review.

Thank you to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for an arc of this book.

Wake is a graphic novel that is a combination of nonfiction about a historian's research into Women Led Slave Revolts and heavily researched historical recreations of events. So much of the history Hall was researching was unavailable to the point she had to extrapolate from the research she had to get imaginings of some of the events she wanted to portray.

This story was very hard to read because of the content, but extremely informative and well-written. The illustrations were beautifully and poignantly done and I loved that it was a mix of Hall's research as well as recreations of what she was researching. The overlap of her subject matter and what she herself was doing was very meaningful.

This book gave me a lot to think about and I definitely think it did the job that Hall set out to do.

Pub Date: June 1, 2021

Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Slavery, Death, Murder, Confinement, and Torture

Transcript (may contain minor differences from the actual podcast):

Welcome to ARC Nemesis, a show that aims to review my massive backlog of Advanced Reader Copies so that publishers give me even more of them. I’m Jen Zink and on this week’s episode, I’ll be talking about Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Dr. Rebecca Hall, illustrated by Hugo Martinez.

(Music)

Hello everyone! Hi Random People! Thanks for tuning in to Episode 9 of ARC Nemesis! Hopefully it will be considerate enough for you to give me a dollar at patreon.com/loopdilou or to leave me a review on itunes! Did you see how weird that sounded? I need more patrons to thank! Become one today!

So, this has been a week. I got my first vaccine shot! Yay! I had an allergic reaction severe enough that I can’t get the second one without talking to an allergist! Boo! Luckily, everyone else in my immediate family has now had at least their first shot and my parents are fully vaccinated so that’s genuinely great news. I’ll get myself sorted out, but let’s just say I’ve had a couple of well earned panic attacks this week. I had angioedema in response to the first one which, in layman's terms means, I didn’t get quite to needing immediate medical attention, but much closer than I would have liked! And yet I still encourage all of you to go get your vaccine if you haven’t already and can do so. Although maybe find a place with nursing staff if you’re at all worried. Apparently the US is at 20% fully vaccinated which, frankly, I’m shocked by. Sadly, that doesn’t actually include many who are at high risk of catching mad covid (versus mild covid?), which is why it’s everyone else’s job to start making the world a safer place! So get to it. Because right now I’m mildly concerned I can’t get a second shot. We’ll see! I don’t know! There’s really not an instruction manual for bad reactions, which is concerning in and of itself. All of which is to say, I’m tired. I feel like I’ve been running with negative modifiers since Monday night. So, it’s REALLY great news that my new tablet arrived! With a new tablet meant access to Netgalley Shelf, which is basically an ARC platform that image heavy ARCs do much better on and I *FINALLY* got to read the graphic novel I’m talking about today. This podcast is totally a business expense, right? Y’all are madly impressed with my audio editing skills and are going to hire me? Good. Just wanted to make that clear for next year’s taxes.

Alright, so, today’s ARC is Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Dr. Rebecca Hall, illustrated by Hugo Martinez and published by Simon and Schuster but it actually won’t be out until June 1st, so give it some pre-order love. This is probably the heaviest work that I’ve read up until now for this podcast and I don’t know if that’s because it’s non-fiction or if it’s because it’s a graphic novel, but it was a difficult but necessary and powerful read. Content warnings for racist and misogynist violence, rape, murder, and depictions of slavery.

I actually cut my teeth on comic books and graphic novels (like literally you can ask my dad how many comic books I ruined as a small child) so the emergence of non-fiction works has been really gratifying to see and I wish I had them when I was in highschool. Wake is actually part memoir, part narrative nonfiction and this form provides an incredibly effective way to display data while also invoking images that bring that data to life. Wake is drawn completely in black and white, which proves more than enough to transform Dr. Hall’s story into a gut punch. It’s particularly effective in this graphic novel because this is specifically about a HIDDEN history, by which I mean a history that is buried so deep in the archives that it requires piecing things together like a quilt… or rather… it’s a bit like reading a comic book: each panel has gaps between it. If you want every frame of a story, you watch a movie. Comic books and graphic novels create a narrative short hand. You know a person has turned their head from one frame to the next because the pictures give you the context you need to fill in those gaps. And this is not actually an easy thing for everyone to pick up on immediately. Reading graphic novels requires learning a new way to process information. That’s essentially what Dr. Hall had to do to study women-led slave revolts. And what Wake gives us is *that* story, Dr. Hall’s search for data interspersed with her interpretations of that data in a narrative form. In essence, giving us the gaps between the panels. And that history is heartbreaking and maddening and haunting and ultimately, to Dr. Hall, empowering as she reclaims that history.

Wake takes us through three locations in the history of the American slave trade and the middle passage. But where Dr. Hall actually begins is at the end, one of the major destinations for enslaved people: New York City. These panels actually proved some of the most effective as the illustrator, Hugo Martinez, weaves together contemporary scenes with historical facts, like a line of enslaved people in chains in the reflection of a puddle as Dr. Hall waves down a taxi, or burning colonial American buildings in the glass of a modern storefront. It’s as if history were bleeding into her present, as she buries herself in record after dehumanizing record. In another area we see a reproduction of how enslaved people were packed in cargo holds, instead of the enslaved people themselves, reminding us that to the people in the system built around their enslavement, they were only chattel. Interspersed with this we see the stories of the revolts unfold before us and then occasionally, because one person can only bear so much, we get to see those moments when Dr. Hall has to remind herself of who she is in the present in order to find strength to tell her ancestors stories. And throughout the graphic novel, the words of the white slaveholders, ships’ captains, and insurance actuators, are replicated on the page, allowing them to condemn themselves.

The last thing that I’ll say is that… in some ways the art of Wake is raw and unfinished feeling, there’s very little gradation here, just pure blacks, and stark whites so that you’re forced to see the gaps, to fill them in the same Dr. Hall has, in essence to reclaim the history that is denied to enslaved people and their descendents. This graphic novel is ultimately about that reclamation and in that way, as a white women, is clearly not for me, and yet it burns in my view, the ways in which the system of slavery denied Black people their story and how systemic racism reinforces it TODAY. This isn’t just a history, it’s a present and both Dr. Rebecca Hall’s words and Hugo Martinez’s art work in tandem to bring it to us.

In other words: Go pre-order Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, because you need to read it.

And that’s it for this week’s episode. Please leave a rating or review on itunes so that other listeners can find my little corner of Podcastia. And also because I thrive on praise. If you have enjoyed listening, maybe pledge your support at Patreon.com/Loopdilou, where you can also find transcripts for all the episodes of ARC Nemesis. For free. Or don’t. Cool. I’ll keep making them anyway. You can find me at Loopdilou (L O O P D I L O U) on twitter and instagram and I’ll be back next week because you can never have too many books.

(Music)

Music for this podcast is "Outer Orbit" by Revolution Void (CC BY 3.0)

A dive into the erasure of black female slaves and an author's quest for answers through history.

Equal parts memoir, history, and speculation come together to contribute to the question of black women's roles in slave revolts. The story follows Rebecca as she researches the archives of many places to piece together the story of female slaves who led revolts but whose narratives were erased.

Readers will enjoy the balance of Dr. Rebeccas Hall's own story of researching the topic and her family history. They will face the uncomfortable truth digging into this history reveals and the questions that continue to be unanswered. There are copies of historical documents included in many of the stories and clarification where speculations are made. The flow of the story is continuous with the illustrations carrying the narrative throughout the book. The only issue I had while reading is at times the text appeared shaky like a person's handwriting, which in some ways is reflective of the emotions the author may have experienced while writing the scene. (So that may be intentional)

The illustrations perfectly capture the emotions, action, and symbolism in each panel. There is as much to analyze in each illustration as there is to process in the reading. The black and white coloring balances the somberness of the story very well. There is a good balance of text to illustration in the book, often allowing the illustrations to carry the message that words cannot. The transition between timeframes is well captured in the images and clearly labeled in the text.

This is a good read on a challenging topic. Readers will appreciate the breaks in the text to gather the emotions of the character in the narrative described.

Thank you Simon & Schuster, NetGalley and Rebecca Hall for giving me the opportunity to read and review this novel before publishing. All the opinions in this review are my own.

I feel so truly honored to have been able to read Wake early, because this was truly a masterpiece. Rebecca Hall went through so, so much in order to bring us this story, and I will never be able to understand the emotional toll this must have taken. I can only thank her for this.

Wake tells the stories of various slave revolts led by women who were truly erased from the narrative. She examines the roles of sexism and racism in this erasure, and travels all over the US and even to the EU in order to research and explore this. I found myself so moved throughout this story. Rebecca Hall captures her own emotional journey in such a poignant way. The illustration is beautiful and impactful in telling a story on its own, and creatively gives us mirror images of today as post-slavery and the images from years past during slavery in America and the slave trade. I highly recommend that others read this story, and I think it does truly stand up to Persepolis’s caliber of magnificent.

This book was incredibly emotional to read, the weaving of Rebecca Hall's story with those she was researching was incredibly impactful. The art is from Hugo Martinez only works to further iterate that with the melding of present New York with that of New York's past. making it feel even more intertwined.

Reading this was a look at stories that do go untold, but also is a scathing reminder about the amount of historical knowledge that goes unknown either by the fact we aren't looking for it or it is held in the hands of private companies that refuse to disclose it.

If you ever wanted to know what a historical dissertation is like, read this book. Wake: The Hidden History of Women Led Slave Revolts recounts Rebecca Hall’s dissertation research and process in graphical format. Her findings are fascinating. We may think we learned in school about the Middle Passage and triangular trade and even the lingering legacy of slavery still bound and codified into our current society, but Hall adds the layer of gender stereotypes hiding more examples of Black women attempting to change the system. I personally love seeing the history we thought we knew expanded to include the contributions and efforts of all involved, not just those we traditionally accepted as the keepers of history. She even suggests that some of the results may have even connected to the known tribes of women warriors. Hall also illustrates the role of others such as insurance companies profited from and continue to benefit from the legacy of slavery.

My only qualm with this book is the artwork done by Hugo Martínez. The drawings look to be pen and ink, and they do not detract with the words at all. The way he depicts Hall is lovely. It is the drawings of the initial women on the boat with which I take issue. In some panes, they appear depicted as animalistic. In others, the over exaggerated and fetishized features that became unfortunate comic book tropes. It is possible to depict strength (clearly done in the drawing of faces) without resorting to the Barbie-like depictions of the female form.

I am part of an equity and social justice book group, and I still would recommend this title to my clubmates despite my one issue with the artwork. Think of this as an adult version of Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales style of explaining history in graphic format. Thank you Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my unbiased review.