Good Dirt
by Charmaine Wilkerson
read by January LaVoy
Books on Tape, 2025. 11 hours, 27 minutes.
Review written August 22, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
Good Dirt, from the author of Black Cake, is another sweeping saga that shows us a person in extraordinary circumstances in the present and weaves a tapestry of history around that person.
In Good Dirt, Ebony Freeman has fled to France in order to get some time to herself, nine months after the man she was supposed to marry didn’t show up for the wedding.
This wasn’t Ebbie’s first brush with notoriety, and the first time was even worse: When she was ten years old, her fifteen-year-old brother was shot in their Connecticut home when some thieves were trying to steal their family’s historic old jar. Ebbie was with her brother when he died and saw the jar in pieces on the floor.
The family was proud of that jar, and loved to tell stories about its history. It came to New England when Ebbie’s great-great-grandfather brought it along when he stowed away on a ship and made his way to freedom. Moses, the enslaved man who made the jar, carved an inscription on the bottom of the jar, at a time when it was illegal for enslaved people to read or write. That inscription has inspired the family for generations.
But now Ebbie’s managing her friend’s guesthouse in France – and the first people to show up are her ex-fiance and his new girlfriend, Ashley. It’s not as big a coincidence as it seems – Ashley had picked up an ad Ebbie’s friend had placed in a neighborhood cafe when she was in the area for Ebbie’s planned wedding. But the awkward situation forces Ebbie to think through a lot of things she’d been avoiding.
And that’s the situation that fuels the book. Ebbie decides to write the stories of the jar, and we learn its rich history while watching Ebbie deal with her own history and what this all means for the present with the man she’d planned to marry in front of her on the other side of the ocean.
As in Black Cake, Charmaine Wilkerson gives us multiple perspectives on events. I, for one, didn’t care what the ex-fiance thought about things – but she uses even that to help us get to know the whole family – all still dealing with the loss of Ebbie’s brother, and trying to go on with dignity in the present.
This is another powerful story that completely enthralls.
Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/good_dirt.html
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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.
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