Junie

• Author: Erin Crosby Eckstine
• Genre: Historical Fiction
• Publication Date: February 4, 2025
• Publisher: Ballantine Books

Thank you to NetGalley and Ballantine Books for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

A young girl must face a life-altering decision after awakening her sister’s ghost, navigating truths about love, friendship, and power as the Civil War looms.

Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. Her daydreams are filled with poetry and faraway worlds, while she spends her nights secretly roaming through the forest, consumed with grief over the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie.

When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, she commits a desperate act—one that rouses Minnie’s spirit from the grave, tethered to this world unless Junie can free her. She enlists the aid of Caleb, the guests’ coachman, and their friendship soon becomes something more. Yet as long-held truths begin to crumble, she realizes Bellereine is harboring dark and horrifying secrets that can no longer be ignored.

With time ticking down, Junie begins to push against the harsh current that has controlled her entire life. As she grapples with an increasingly unfamiliar world in which she has little control, she is forced to ask herself: When we choose love and liberation, what must we leave behind?

Behind every single ARC that I request and receive, is a genuine desire to read the story and love it. I have gotten much better at picking books that I’ll enjoy than I was even a few years ago, but my judgment isn’t always the best and sometimes I’ll pick up a book that I just don’t connect to. Sometimes the story veers in a different direction than I was hoping, I don’t connect to the characters, or any other variety of reasons. What it all boils down to is that you should take my review with a grain of salt, because all of my reviews are based on my own subjective experience, and you might just love a book I didn’t enjoy.

I make it a habit to avoid reading any reviews before I read the book itself. Not just to avoid spoilers, but also to sidestep the possibility that I start the book with a view biased by someone I trust. So I started this book with no preconceived notions except that I’d most likely find it to be a good read. I was expecting this to deal with heavy topics, particularly because it takes place before slavery was abolished. However, I had a difficult time with this book. I wound up switching to the audiobook version for some of the read to see if that helped, and for the most part it did. 

The story centers around 16-year-old Junie, who has been enslaved on the same plantation for her entire life, and despite her dark skin, has grown up as a playmate and then maid to the daughter of the plantation owner. But the events that occur during this book made Junie seem so incredibly naïve. My father grew up during wartime and said that after the experience of the Holocaust, there were no children left, only young adults if they were fortunate enough to survive. I mention this, because like there is nothing that can be compared to the Holocaust. It had such an enduring effect on Jewish people. And while nothing can be compared to chattel slavery, I can easily see how 400 years of the cruelest oppression any psychopath could dream up would have an enduring effect on Black people descended from enslaved ancestors. 

The writing is beautifully descriptive, and that’s a clear standout skill from the author. Despite it being approximately 17ºF in New York, and closer to high 60s in my house, I could feel the waves of heat the characters were experiencing with no relief, and read most of this reading in a tank top and shorts (they were the easiest thing to put over my boot), shivering while reading this summer tale.

Bellereine Plantation is in Alabama, and I can only imagine that no enslaved Black people were spared the brutal realities of the life they were facing—the complete dehumanization to where PEOPLE were viewed as property, the fact that a white person could do whatever they wanted and there was no avenue for justice or even human rights, and that they weren’t in control of any aspect of their life. By the time the story starts, it seems like the plantation isn’t doing too well, since they are running with a skeleton crew. There are barely enough slaves to keep up with all the house duties, which is how dark-skinned Junie winds up being a ‘house slave,’ although there are multiple uses of the N-word, as I’d unfortunately expect to see in any accurate historical fiction set on a plantation in the deep South.

Somehow, despite Junie growing up as the one dark-skinned girl allowed to work in the house, with constant apologies to guests for how dark the maid is. Since Violet has grown up with Junie as her companion and now her maid, Junie has been exposed to some advantages that others aren’t privy to—like learning how to read and write at Violet’s side. I didn’t really understand how she could be living her life as an enslaved person and still be so naïve about the life right in front of her eyes.

I struggled to fully connect with Junie, because she comes off as so sheltered and young. Not age-young, but maturity-wise. In some ways, she was far more mature for her years, and in other ways, this read a lot like a MG character’s way of thinking, rather than a girl who is on the verge of becoming a woman. And speaking of which, as Junie navigates through her 16th year, she doesn’t seem to realize what happens to a woman’s slave when she gets married. I found it hard to believe that none of the older and/or wiser enslaved people who lived with and cared for Junie had ever pulled her aside and explained what can happen if she doesn’t fall into line to keep her as safe as possible. But with Junie facing the encroaching betrothal of Violet, she has no thoughts that she might be separated from the people she’s known her entire life. She has no knowledge of what can happen to her if she isn’t the perfect maid and doesn’t have the knack of being able to fade invisibly into the background. Events start to go sideways, and before long, Junie is trying to fulfill a task for her sister so her spirit can move on. This is a common belief in other cultural groups as well as my own, so it didn’t seem strange to me. 

For me, the paranormal elements of the story were the least cohesive. I had some difficulty integrating the haint of her sister to the non-paranormal elements of the story. Sometimes it felt like it furthered the story for sure, and at other times, the pace slowed and it didn’t seem to have much of an impact on the story. This is one of those books where I kept hoping it would get better. I had actually began to toy with the idea of DNFing, but realizing I was more than halfway through, I didn’t. I’m so glad that I didn’t, because the last 15-20% of the book is fast-paced, engaging, and literally had me on the edge of my seat to find out what would happen next. 

Eckstine also has the talent of crafting characters who were mostly all believable and realistic, well-rounded individuals. Violet struck me in particular, and if you’ve read Babel by R.F. Kuang, you’ll understand why. I loved seeing how the characters engaged with each other, behaving as differently with found family as with new people and the people who enslave them, and enjoyed the conversations the characters had—it’s that effortless easy way the Black people in the story have with each other, and a sense of fierce protectiveness of each other, despite the fact that that they were cowed into submission by any number of brutal means. And even as Junie is coping with the events occurring in the story, she struggles with an inner conflict of guilt and feeling responsible for the death of her older sister with no healthy outlet for support and reassurance.

Overall, this wasn’t a bad book—there wasn’t anything wrong with it that I can put my finger on. Junie’s sense of innocence didn’t feel realistic to me, and it made it more difficult for me to warm to her quickly, and the ghostly visions of Minnie had me feeling like I missed something somewhere along the way. But by the end, I was firmly team Junie, even if the action and emotions the story had pulled out of me at the end weren’t enough to overcome the things that I didn’t like. Honestly, it just wasn’t a good fit for me personally, which is why I started this review by saying this is my own subjective opinion, and the good news is that I seem to be in the minority of people who didn’t rate this book highly, at least according to Goodreads. You might want to pick this one up if: you like American and especially Southern history leading up to the Civil War; are intrigued by the summary; want to learn more about the impact enslavement had on every aspect of the lives of these people in a historical fiction format; if you like a little slow-burn, low-spice, sweet romance; and particularly if you like a little magical realism/paranormal twist in your historical fiction.

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