American Daughters

Huguley (By Her Own Design) returns with a novel in two voices portraying the unlikely friendship between Portia Marshall Washington Pittman (the daughter of Booker T. Washington) and Alice Roosevelt (the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt). Chanté McCormick offers a sensitive and contemplative narration of Portia, an accomplished musician who studied in Europe, where she promoted the spiritual music that her family loved. McCormick ably adopts a rougher tone when communicating the invectives of Portia’s abusive husband, architect Sid Pittman, while narrator Kristen Sieh uses a sparkling yet astringent upper-class modulation to enliven Alice’s antics. Though Alice is depicted as rather self-absorbed and privileged, she too encounters a difficult marriage and the restrictions placed on her as a woman navigating life in the early 20th century.