Morgan Jerkins' Zeal is an engrossing, unpredictable story of Black love, family, and freedom

Zeal is an engrossing tale of a heartfelt love born during slavery, and how the couple’s descendants have the potential to embody their forebears’ greatest dreams—if they can get past some messy obstacles.

The novel opens on a moonlit evening in Manhattan, as Oliver Benjamin and Ardelia Gibbs celebrate their engagement with relatives and friends at an elegant party. With his parents’ blessing, Oliver gifts Ardelia a precious heirloom: a poetic, heartfelt letter dated October 1865, written by his ancestor Tirzah Ambrose to her beloved, Harrison, from whom she was separated during wartime.

Over the next 150 years, their families’ stories unfold, beginning just after the Civil War. Wearing a Union soldier’s blue uniform, Harrison returns to the plantation in Natchez, Mississippi, where they had been enslaved, only to discover the site in ruins and Tirzah nowhere to be found. Now residing in Shreveport, Louisiana, Tirzah has a kind preacher looking out for her welfare, but she never gives up hope of reuniting with Harrison.

Jerkins is a superb storyteller who nimbly uses a vast swath of American history for her canvas, from the Freedmen’s Bureaus that supported the formerly enslaved, the Black Codes that legalized discrimination, the Great Migration, and much more… leading through the isolation of the Covid pandemic. Revealing specifics of the plot risks spoilers; the novel is best experienced through the author’s own words.

Covering impressive geographic and emotional ground, she explores her strong-minded characters’ choices as they pursue romantic liaisons and the freedom to live as they wish, sometimes getting in their own way. The trauma they encounter is laid bare on the page, and the love they share echoes even more strongly. An unforgettable story of ancestral legacies and the long journey to understand and overcome them.

Zeal was published by Harper in the US, Canada, and the UK earlier this year. My review originally appeared in the Historical Novels Review.  If you're in the US, you can get a copy on Kindle for $1.99 during the month of September.  It's well worth it!