But once installed as lady of the manor - under the name Lily Dove - at her new husband’s plantation, maintaining the lie about her parentage becomes a matter of life and death. When he abruptly proposes marriage that very afternoon, she embraces the opportunity to escape slavery without questioning his motives. Suddenly, the chance for one appears.ĭuring an outing to town on her 16th birthday, she is mistaken for white by a young man. Caught between guilt over the preferential treatment she receives and petty jealousy from her masters, Dahlia yearns for a better existence. Thanks to her beauty, Dahlia is brought by Holt into the mansion to live and serve as a ladies’ maid for her spoiled white half-sisters. She is also his slave, one of nearly a dozen he has fathered with his Black laborers. In What Passes as Love, Dahlia is the light-skinned daughter of Lewis Holt, a wealthy white plantation owner. Thomas, best known for her successful Nappily Ever After series, offers now an historical novel about a Black woman passing as white in 1850s Virginia. With suspicions of her true identity growing and a bounty hunter not far behind, Dahlia must act fast or pay a devastating price.Thomas, Trisha R., What Passes as Love: A Novel (Seattle: Lake Union Publishing, 2021)Īn escaped slave navigates the white world in a suspenseful bid for freedom. But when Bo arrives on the estate in shackles, Dahlia decides to risk everything to save his life. She also knows she’ll never have this chance at freedom again.Įnsconced in the Ross mansion, Dahlia soon finds herself held captive in a different way?as the dutiful wife of a young man who has set his sights on a political future. Reinventing herself as Lily Dove, Dahlia allows Timothy to believe she’s white, with no family to speak of, and agrees to marry him. Ten years later, Dahlia meets Timothy Ross, an Englishman in need of a wife. Forced to leave behind her best friend, Bo, she lives in a world between black and white, belonging to neither. When Dahlia’s father, the owner of Vesterville plantation, takes her to work in his home as a servant, she’s desperately lonely.

I was six years old the day Lewis Holt came to take me away.īorn into slavery, Dahlia never knew her mother?or what happened to her. A young woman pays a devastating price for freedom in this heartrending and breathtaking novel of the nineteenth-century South.ġ850.

What Passes as Love by Trisha R. Thomas