New Books In Literature

A hundred years before Ellis Island became a processing center for immigrants wishing to enter the United States, Philadelphia had the Lazaretto, a quarantine hospital where every ship entering the harbor from June to September had to stop while those aboard were checked for signs of infectious disease. In a city already known for its diversity by the mid-nineteenth century, the Lazaretto represented both openness to and fear of the outsider. This deep ambivalence, to change and to the other, forms the heart of Lazaretto (Harper, 2016), the sparkling new novel by Diane McKinney-Whetstone, who already has five acclaimed works of fiction to her credit. The US Civil War has just ended. In the home of a well-respected midwife, a white attorney has brought his young black servant, Meda, to abort the child he has fathered on her. But the pregnancy is too far along for such a solution, and the child arrives that very night. The father takes the child, ordering the midwife to tell his servant that her daughter is dea