This story of a personal and national legacy is a powerful reminder that while the past is gone, we still live in its wake. Illustrated beautifully in black and white, Wake will take its place alongside classics of the graphic novel genre, like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Art Spiegelman’s Maus. We also follow Rebecca’s own story as the legacy of slavery shapes her life, both during her time as a successful attorney and later as a historian seeking the past that haunts her. Using a “remarkable blend of passion and fact, action and reflection” (NPR), Rebecca constructs the likely pasts of Adono and Alele, women rebels who fought for freedom during the Middle Passage, as well as the stories of women who led slave revolts in Colonial New York. But Rebecca decides to look deeper, and her journey takes her through old court records, slave ship captain’s logs, crumbling correspondence, and even the forensic evidence from the bones of enslaved women from the “negro burying ground” uncovered in Manhattan. The accepted history of slave revolts has always told her that enslaved women took a back seat. Rebecca Hall, a historian, granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacy of slavery. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. With its remarkable blend of passion and fact, action and reflection, Wake sets a new standard for illustrating history. Women warriors planned and led revolts on slave ships during the Middle Passage. Halls eloquence and frank emotionalism are transcendently realized in Martínez art, beckoning the reader inexorably into this storyeven the parts that only take place inside Halls mind. Part graphic novel, part memoir, Wake is an imaginative tour-de-force that tells the “powerful” ( The New York Times Book Review) story of women-led slave revolts and chronicles scholar Rebecca Hall’s efforts to uncover the truth about these women warriors who, until now, have been left out of the historical record. A Best Book of 2021 by NPR and The Washington Post

Wake by Rebecca Hall