Indigo Girl by Natasha Boyd

 genre: historical fiction

For Eliza Lucas, the British colony of South Carolina is home and her father's plantation is her world.  Privileged and white, yes, Eliza's life is a good one but with the weight of financial ruin a possibility if their crops don't flourish and sell at market.  When Eliza's father must leave the country for his military ambitions, Eliza is left behind with the responsibility of keeping her family's resources afloat.   Using her love of botany and financial sense, Eliza decides she wants to try and grow indigo, a plant that when processed will produce a deep blue dye for which Europe will pay a high price.  The only problem?  She doesn't know how to make it.  But her slaves do.  How Eliza navigates Charleston society as a woman with ambition and scientific interests and how she interacts with the humans she owns pushes along the plot of this historical novel.

I found it a really fast and interesting read.  I knew nothing about either indigo or its production and I actually visited Charleston a couple years ago so it was fun for me to read a book set in the Low Country of my memory.  The historical context felt, for the most part, very real and I felt grounded by what was going on around Eliza with the exception of how she sometimes dealt with her slaves.  I recognize that a lot of the book is based on her actual letters so I do believe that she may have been a somewhat benevolent slave owner but - still a slave owner - so some of the hints of white saviorism might be upsetting and frustrating to a Black reader.  While this did bother me, I appreciated the role Eliza was trying to play as a woman in a society that didn't value intelligent womanhood either and her struggle to have place in decision making felt realistic.  It would've been nice to have heard from other perspectives on the plantation (i.e. a slave) but overall, I liked the book.