My Secrets Cry Aloud

My Secrets Cry Aloud by Sherry Robinson is a highly creative and touching novel about seven women who have lived in the same house over a period of two hundred years. Each woman leaves behind journal entries read by every woman who comes after her, thereby revealing not only the historical times of each woman's life, but the quotidian lives of joy and disappointment, family and community, experienced by them all. From the former slave to the young law student, the elderly pioneer to the homemaker in search of her identity, the teenager struggling with abandonment to the woman surviving divorce, Robinson delves into the women's condition with compassion and a keen eye. There is an assumption that we are comprised of those who came before us. Robinson takes this to a new dimension when she shows that a house can be a substitute for genetic history, and that those living under its roof become a part of its historical personality.