In The Confessions of Frannie Langton, Frannie shares her story of being formerly enslaved in Jamaica, who is then brought to England as an (under) employed servant, becomes a dominatrix sex worker, and later accused of murdering her employers.

Sis goes through a lot...

Everyone in book club was a little hesitant to start this book because the marketing focused on it being a slave narrative, an Lorde knows we can’t all handle the trauma that tends to come from books about slavery. But by in the first couple of pages, Frannie won us over convincing us that we’ve never read a book like this before.

“This is a story of love, not just murder, though I know that’s not the kind of story you’re expecting. In truth, no one expects any kind of story from a woman like me. No doubt you think this will be one of those slave histories, all sugared over with misery and despair. But who’d want to read one of those? No, this is my account of myself and my own life and the happiness that came to it, which was not a thing I thought I’d ever be allowed, the happiness or the account.”

Excerpt From: Sara Collins. “The Confessions of Frannie Langton.”

The book does indeed highlight slavery through the stories of experiments done on Caribbean plantations in the name of “science”, the motivations of white abolitionists, and other themes that we don’t see in best selling books based in the 19th Century England that are still on our CXC syllabus cough cough Jane Austen. Perhaps one of the best things about The Confessions of Frannie Langton is that it doesn’t throw historical records in our faces, instead, Sara Collins subtly shows how slavery built the UK’s wealth and how many people living in the UK never had to think about it when they asked for someone to “pass the sugar”.

At the start of book club a few people acknowledged that they stayed up all night reading the book, and Candiese even did a speed-read through the last few pages just before the meeting so she could talk about it! 🤣

Kristina summed up a lot of our feelings about being introduced to Frannie and Frannie’s drive to tell her own story.

The style of The Confessions of Frannie Langton is something we also admired for its very poetic and metaphorical language. In the book “scientists” try to find reasons for treating black people as sub-human, whereas Frannie uses logic and her hunger for knowledge to discover more about her humanity and the brutal ironies of abolitionists and slave-owners alike.

“It is impossible to be both black and a woman. Did you know that? No one was asking me to give any lectures. They allow some blacks to impress them. Men like Sancho, Equiano … Yet I fail to see what was so impressive about them. They wrote, yes. But thousands could, if someone would bother to teach them. And everything they wrote was written for whites. Petitions. Appeals. It’s another of this world’s laws. Blacks will write only about suffering, and only for white people, as if our purpose here is to change their minds.”

Excerpt From: Sara Collins. “The Confessions of Frannie Langton.”

Finally, the sex… oh the sex. No one saw The School House scenes coming and we couldn’t have predicted how thought-provoking it would’ve been to see 19th-century dominatrix black women in London. This spurred a lot of discussions about the politics of sex and how trauma can make its way into sex and sex work.

(No videos on that, go read the book! lol)

Another thing we really admired about the book was the intense that went into it. So much so that Natasha put together a playlist featuring all of Sara’s youtube videos talking about the research for the book.

There were a few things we wished were included in the book, particularly more about Paradise, Montego-Bay and more interactions between Frannie and other black people.

We got a chance to interview Sara Collins about her debut novel in our podcast Like A Real Book Club, and without even mentioning that we wanted to see more of Paradise, she brought up why she chose to tell the story the way she did.

Bonus: She talks about her upcoming sophomore novel.

And, in case you missed it, we also did our Like A Real Book Club podcast meetup to talk about this book in more details about the book and its plot.

We highly recommend reading this book and we guarantee it’s unlike any story you’ve read and we’re happy that it’s being adapted into a television series.

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