This book was amazing!!! Part memoir, part forgotten history of bad-a** black women who fought their enslavement. Parts of it were certainly difficult to read -- it's a graphic novel about slavery -- but it made the story just that much more impactful. Hall is an incredible historian and storyteller. I hope this is taught in schools!

Part historical deep dive into the forgotten women who lead the uprising of enslaved people, part memoir about one woman's incredible efforts to unearth the almost impossible to uncover truth, and all graphic novel, Wake is an exploration into the barely recorded history of the oftentimes nameless and faceless women who rose up to take their own freedom ... no matter the cost.

'Wake' tells the important stories of forgotten female-led slave revolts through a tasteful combination of historical context, present-day memoir, and vivid imagery. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that these stories have been hidden, ignored, and buried throughout time, and the author effectively showcases her struggle in uncovering the truth.

This graphic truly does an excellent job at expressing information that the author uncovers in a way that makes it seem that you're there with her, struggling for the truth of what really happened. What follows is both historical information of the women that Hall discovered, as well as her own journey in finding that information.

The art definitely plays as much a role in expressing things to the reader as the author's own voice does. It's detailed where it needs to be, precise and effective in its role.

The formatting was a little weird, perhaps because I read it in PDF form, but I would definitely consider this book a must-read for everyone. Disheartening as it was to see how these women and their actions had been silenced and hidden, it really is up to us to keep their stories and legacies alive.

Rebecca Hall is a lawyer and a history professor who ended up going down a rabbit hole while researching one of her cases. She became fascinated with women who led slave revolts in New York. These women were mentioned in some documents but there wasn't much detail. Hall started to dig through various sources to try to find more information on particular women who were involved. This graphic novel tells the story of Rebecca's work and also the story of the women who she discovered in her research. It really highlights how the stories of slaves themselves, particularly female slaves have often been erased. What is left is the story of the oppressor who often left the details of female slaves as side notes, if that. This is a great read for history buffs and those who want to read more #ownvoices stories about slavery.

So I actually did not finish this book so I didn't want to rate it, but I do want to give feedback. (and it looks like you have to give a rating so please take my rating with a grain of salt since I did not finish the book, 2 stars because I didn't finish it but I didn't "hate" it, it just wasn't for me).

So I got about a third of the way into the book, I had a hard time reading it technically, as the text was a little on the small side and the font wasn't clear with it being at that size. I didn't enjoy the art style which made it hard for me to want to continue and I just wasn't super engaged overall. I did like the Idea of it, but I just really struggled getting into it and eventually gave up.

I will admit that as an illustrator myself I do have a bias towards the visuals, so since I didn't jive with the art style it was just really hard for me to want to read it. I didn't feel connected with any of the characters, and I was too focused on my own dislike of the art to focus on the story (and I do apologize, because the art is fine it just isn't for me) I feel bad that I wasn't able to finish the book and give a more in-depth review, but I also don't want to force myself to read something that I am not 'enjoying' in one way or another.

Rebecca Hall is a lawyer and historian. Wake is the result of many years of research looking into the history of female slave revolts.

I love that this is also telling her story. It gives the reader insight into the research process and all of the obstacles that Dr. Hall faced while conducting her research like being denied access to archives despite her credentials. Or when she would find historical records that referenced a female revolutionary, the woman was either unnamed or her words were not recorded.

<blockquote><b><i>"This is one way that history erases us. What we had to say was not even considered important enough to record. You think you are reading an accurate chronicle written at the time but if who we are and what we care about are deemed irrelevant it won't be in there."</i></b></blockquote>

In a world where we relish in providing receipts history proves that for Black women the details were never recorded. There were no receipts given.

There is evidence of how Black women were dehumanized. One woman was sentenced to be executed after leading a revolt that led to the deaths of several whites. Her sentence was stayed because she was pregnant. Not out of compassion but because the child was someone's property.

Oneof the most interesting facts that Hall comes across is the finding that a slave revolt was more likely to to occur if there were more women aboard the slave ship. You read that right. More women = a higher incidence of mutiny.

Hugo Martinez's drawings encapsulate action and emotion. There are pages throughout with little to no words but you still <i><b>feel</b></i> the story. They are dynamic and haunting.

<img src="https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/q_glossy,ret_img,w_1024,h_765/https://magazine.watchjaro.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-01-at-12.08.12-PM-1024x765.png"/>

<img src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/8381984ba0d8d93eb5e3d4b683fe8981b010b741/833_6855_6189_3711/master/6189.jpg?width=1200&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=53401ab679cc4043c547d0411e

** I was provided an electronic ARC by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.**

How could I ever slide by without reading a part-memoir, part-historical-fiction-retelling of the women who lead slave revolts? I couldn't, even simply for not knowing or hearing about this. As the very cleaned up history taught in schools these last few decades never focus on this side of slavery very often, and not with glowing review and harrowing in-depth stories of very specific people, I was ready to be engrossed and shut out the entire world from the moment I opened this book until I could get to the end.

This was so well done, and it's a deep representation of how hard it is to find the true facts of what women have accomplished through time -- especially black women oppressed by slavery -- and how those voices have all but been silenced since they can no longer speak to tell their stories themselves. I loved the alternating timeline of the biographical and the historical. I think the use of graphic novel (much like the use of it for Maus) was an ingenious stroke and it pulls you even deeper into both parts of the stories.

I absolutely loved this. As the title indicates, I knew nothing of woman left slave revolts, and I also knew basically nothing about slavery in New York, and certainly nothing about slave ship revolts. This was a fascinating read, from the details about Dr. Hall's life to her struggle doing the research and the actual research itself was even more compelling. The artwork was beautiful and really makes the book. The blend of the past on the current really seals the book's themes and made an already compelling history into an irresistible and heartbreaking narrative.

Immediately upon reading the synopsis, I was intrigued. It’s easy to forget that graphic novels can go behind the typical superhero genre. There is so much room for amazing graphic novels beyond that and Wake is proof of that. Rebecca Hall did an amazing job telling this story.

Wake follows Rebecca Hall’s quest to find historical evidence of women involved in slavery revolts. Hall’s journey of finding documented information proves to be difficult due to the fact that the events and the women where purposely left out of history. Women are often excluded from the telling of historical events. Despite the challenges of finding the information and combating present day racial issues, Hall makes important discoveries.

It was ingenious of Rebecca Hall to turn a very important story and journey into a graphic novel. Books on subjects such as this one are so important in putting information in audience’s hands. A graphic novel makes it easy for people who don’t enjoy reading or may not have the time. There was such important information. I hope to see more from Rebecca Hall.

This book was fantastic. It looks at the slave revolts that were lead by women, and how assumption and bias as allowed history to forget these stories and the voices of these women. The stories paired with the illustrations brought the history to life. It does a great job of combining these stories with the past of how the past continues to affect the present as Hall tries to do research now.

This graphic novel is an important part of American history. As we all struggle with realizing that our understandings of history have been white-washed and fallen short, Wake provides an eye-opening look into the trafficking of enslaved people.

The format of this graphic novel was a unique concept as you follow Dr. Rebecca Hall as she researches women-led slave revolts. There were a few times that the alternating timeline made the story a bit difficult to follow. That being said, this graphic novel is a must-read.

Hugo Martnez and Rebecca Hall's Wake tells the story of two women who led a slave revolt in New York City. Through hundreds of old documents, Hall learns that a woman who was believed to be Sarah or Abigail was kept in prison for years before being released. Martnez creates a contrast between the other visitors and Hall, drawing her as a reverse silhouette. This comic shows what it's like to do historical research. It also shows an aspect of the process that's never been depicted in a comic before.

From the outside, it doesn't look like a working historian. They tend to sit at a desk for hours on end. Martnez's drawings of Eleanor Hall are both elegant and clever. He uses her eyes to create a series of portraits that combine her thoughts with various other ideas. Martnez' pages can get a bit overcrowded at times, but his work is always impressive. He can create stunning scenes that are seemingly effortless to draw. Martnez' techniques are crucial to Hall's success because governments were keeping records that were essential to their policies, it's difficult to find evidence of slavery's existence, argues historian Susan Davis.

Through the art of Edgar Martnez, Hall's words are realized in a way that draws the reader into this story even though the parts of it that are most personal to him are unseen. Thank you, Simon & Schuster, for the gifted copy via net galley.

"Like invisible forces have shaped everything around you, but you've lost the words to describe them. This is what it means to live in the wake of slavery."

This book was truly incredible, the writing…incredible, the illustrations…incredible, its got the WHOLE package. I was only half way through this book when I IMMEDIATELY preordered my own copy.

We learn in this, easy-to-consume nonfiction graphic novel, about Hall's search for slave revolts in America in the 1700's and not just any slave revolts but ones led by women. Since history is written by the victors, little is known or written about slave revolts, let alone women-led ones. So we are following Hall in 1999 New York City as she digs through archival records and libraries to tell these women's stories. She struggles to find the pieces and she often has to fill in the gaps because she would rather have their stories told in fragments then not at all.

As we dive in and out of the future and past, Martinez illustrates both worlds on the same page. It's beautifully sketched in black and white with such detail, I would often linger on pages after I read all the text just to take it all in.

Hall goes into detail on the burden and difficulty of searching for these stories was on her. Often slaves aboard slave ships were only given numbers, not names, so the captains could keep log of deaths for insurance purposes. Like….wtf? There were so many instances in this book that I was just shocked and disgusted.

I want to thank Hall for doing this research because it could not have been easy and as an archivist I am so glad these stories are being shown the light finally.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for providing me with an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review!

Wake by Dr. Rebecca Hall and illustrated by Hugo Martínez describes the author's struggle to find accurate information about women-led slave revolts in history and simultaneously lightly fictionalizes some of these accounts to contextualize what is being researched. The use of graphic novel is used masterfully to illustrate the emotions that Dr. Hall describes she is feeling throughout and to depict the strength, beauty, grace, inhumane conditions, depraved treatment, and scars of the slaves throughout history.

This incredibly powerful graphic novel/memoir is a book where I don't feel it is my place to join the conversation in a lot of instances. I think this should be required reading and I am angered that this history exists, but I will never understand the intersections discussed here. I am thankful I read this and I will be purchasing it for my library but there are many other people that have more important things say about this novel than me.

Many thanks to Rebecca Hall, Hugo Martinez, NetGalley, and the publisher for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Rebecca Hall hasn't just written a responsibly-imaginative history of women-led slave revolts--she also wrote a memoir of being a Black historian navigating this historical record. This is such an effective book for the combination of those two elements. How we interact with our history and how we choose to address archival silences affects so much including current events, civic engagement, and the future of historical inquiry. We're lucky to have an author like Hall to show us her path to this story and not just the story itself.

Part memoir, part history, this book needs to be in every single classroom in America [and if we are being honest, in the UK too as we find out in this book and how they worked against Dr. Hall and her research - BAD FORM Lloyd's of London. VERY. BAD. FORM. ].

This is the story of Dr. Rebecca Hall and her pursuit of the truth about women-led slave revolts both on the slave ships and on plantations [and how many accounts refuse to talk about it as "women wouldn't be inclined to revolt". Uh, yeah, that's a negative. Idiots] and both the obstacles she encountered [it just blows my mind how ignorant people continue to be] and the pain of reading the slave accounts and knowing that within her own family, there was suffering as slaves. Dr. Hall has devoted her life to history so deep it feels like excavation, and has created a story that is a rough story to begin with, but add the spectacular illustration by Hugo Martinez [who is extremely gifted and brings to life these stories and makes everything just that more heartbreaking] and this is a hard, necessary book to read. This is an absolute MUST READ book. We will never learn if we do not address our past and move to correct the attitudes and behaviors that have been here for hundreds of years.

<i>"Have you ever seen something out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn to focus, it's gone? Like invisible forces have shaped everything around you, but you've lost the words to describe them. This is what it means to live in the wake of slavery."</i>

Thank you to NetGalley, Dr. Rebecca Hall, Hugo Martinez, and Simon & Schuster for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Part Memoir, Part historical truth, Rebecca Hall dives into the forgotten history of female lead slave revolts in this thought provoking graphic novel.

In this book, Hall reveals her research that she has uncovered about women slaves and their roles in revolting against their their masters. Facing resistance everywhere she looks, Hall's research was not easy. Which makes this book even more important.

It's great to finally have these stories get the attention they deserve. The stories of these women are remarkable and prove the power of a collective can have against any oppressor.

The graphics in this book are just as great as the stories. The drawings are focused mainly on the storyteller and the slave women and not much of the slavers.

Thank you, NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for an arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This book does a fantastic job of illustrating just how poorly women’s history is taught and how slavery is taught. I had absolutely no idea that women slaves led so many revolts and yet were wiped so completely from history. I’m shocked every time history gets reframed from a woman’s perspective and also kind of ashamed about how shocked I always feel.

Dr. Hall educates us about the women-led slave revolts she uncovered during her studies as well as how difficult it was to study this subject. Definitely emotionally, but also logistically. I got so mad reading the panel about the insurance company prohibiting her from completing research about slave ships. It makes me so mad that corporations are withholding so much information because it’ll be bad for their bottomline and paint them in a bad light, never mind the fact that it’s history and so many voices are going unheard because of this gross viewpoint. On top of this, the number of voices that were never recorded because they were deemed unimportant is astounding. And the point Dr. Hall made about slave runners consistently underestimating the women on the ships, thinking them incapable of anything but being raped? All of this got my blood boiling.

Mini-rant aside, this book was eye-opening. I learned new things and I learned that I didn’t know/wasn’t taught a lot. I really liked the medium of a graphic novel to get these points across. The illustrations were great (though I wish I had seen them in color) and the combination of memoir/story did a good job of keeping me interested while also teaching me.

This history should definitely be taught more freely than it is right now, and it shouldn’t be as difficult to research as Dr. Hall showed it was. Readers of all ages and backgrounds would benefit from reading this!

Wake uses archival records to piece together the untold story of female-led slave rebellions and revolts.

However, it is also a memoir of the author’s difficulty in obtaining the information. Despite having a Ph.D. in history, she runs right into the wall labeled the victors write the history. And these “victors” didn’t see female slaves as important enough to even record their court testimony before being burned at the stake.

Unfortunately, the lack of records forces Dr. Hall to use “historical imagination in order to reconstruct a story”. While I am disappointed that this “history” was fictionalized, the two stories within Wake are excellent. Who knew that 10% of slave ships had an insurrection? Or that the one thing that separated the rebellious ships from the others was “the more women onboard a slave ship, the more likely a revolt would occur”. The illustrations are pen and ink in a woodcut style, which is perfect to set the time period (1700s) in the reader’s mind.

Wake is an important book with previously untold stories. It should be in every library. 4 stars!

Thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for a copy in exchange for my honest review.

I picked up Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts because it sounded really interesting. We don’t know much about most of the slaves who were brought here to US shores, and I know many descendants of slavery have trouble finding out any ancestry information. Partly because the records were not well-kept, mostly because the slaves were “just” chattel and not worth naming. So when I saw this title on NetGalley, I had to see what Rebecca Hall found in her research.

And I have to say: Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts is an emotional read. Hall’s words & Martinez’s illustrations bring home the point that nobody cared a whit about these human lives, other than in what they could profit off them. I’ve read articles describing the conditions on slaver ships, but I’d never seen anything resembling records. The cruelty of stripping the humanity from people, to reduce them to “Man” or “Woman Slave #n“, has to be one of the lowest points of our history as a human race.

The history is enlightening; the journey to get to that history and their details, frustrating. Hall faced more roadblocks than I expected her to, because nobody wanted to admit to partaking in the sale of human lives, even if they had the records to prove that not only did they partake, they did so for the profit. There’s even math to calculate the number of slaves a ship could hold!

What I appreciated most about this part-memoir part-history, is how Hall attempts to figure out who the women on the ships were. The patriarchy was in full stride, and any mention of women were brushed past like pesky flies. It’s as if women were just extras to the story of men – even men doing evil deeds. Obviously they didn’t add logic to math, because this sentence struck out at me:

The more women onboard a slave ship, the more likely a revolt would occur (Wake p.149)

If anything, I wish Wake had more success with the women Hall attempted to find. Other than some names, there are no details, no histories of these women who decided that a life enslaved was not what they wanted – and they did something about it. Even if that something is to bring about their ends.

drey’s rating: Excellent! Everyone should read this, if only to learn a little more of the history of slavery – and banish several misconceptions about it.