From Publishers Weekly
In 1810, Sarah Baartman sailed willingly from her home in South Africa to England with her English husband, believing that fame awaited her as an African dancing queen. Well, she certainly found fame. Based on the true story of a woman who was exhibited as part of a freak show in London's Piccadilly and upon her death at age 27 was publicly dissected in France, this novel by poet, sculptor and novelist Chase-Riboud (Sally Hemings) conveys Sarah's victimization so well that the reader is still cringing after the last page is turned. Sarah herself copes with the harsh reality of her husband's betrayal-she's essentially been sold into slavery-through denial and gin. Her best chance to escape comes when abolitionist Robert Wedderburn intervenes by bringing her contract before a judge in an attempt to rescue her. Sarah, however, won't go along with it, because she doesn't want to return to Good Hope, where her Khoekhoe tribe struggles against colonization. Wedderburn captures the reader's frustration when he tells Sarah: "You are the unwitting collaborator of your own exploitation, agent of your own dehumanization!" Indeed, there are many tough scenes to endure, as Europeans endlessly ridicule her body and elongated genitals (mutilated as part of a tribal ritual) and examine her as a scientific curiosity. What makes the story, and Sarah's life, more bearable are the tender scenes with Alice, Sarah's English governess who stays with her and truly cares for her. Kudos to Chase-Riboud for exploring this story of oppression and for humanizing a woman who was virtually regarded as an animal, according to the ideology of the day. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
As she did in her best-selling Sally Hemings (1979), Chase-Riboud dramatizes a true story. This time, she goes back to the Dutch colonies of 1810 to recount the life of Sarah Baartman, a South African woman who was coerced into becoming an exotic dancer by two parasitic men. Having already lost her family in the Dutch and English massacres, Sarah faced certain death by staying in South Africa. Unfortunately, her journey toward a better life results in another kind of exploitation--this time on the freak show circuit in London. Forced into a cage in African garb, which allows the crowd of onlookers to intimately inspect her body, Sarah is put on public display as an example of a primitive oddity. Sadly, the dehumanization of Sarah did not stop with her death. In 1816, her dissected body was exhibited in a French Museum. In 2002, after a long legal battle, her remains were finally laid to rest in South Africa. Praise to Chase-Riboud for her total immersion in the spirit of Sarah Baartman. Elsa Gaztambide
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“Sweeping, kaleidoscopic . . . A hauntingly compelling tale.” —Los Angeles Times

“Barbara Chase-Riboud should be praised for attempting such a difficult and important story. . . . She creates some horribly memorable scenes.” --The New York Times Book Review

“A bravura act of outrage and grace . . . written with shattering passion.” —The Boston Globe
“Disturbing and heartbreaking. . . . Illustrates how racial cruelty can be tightly wrapped in a shroud of scientific reason.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A splendid epic of a young woman’s life that later became a country’s touchstone. . . . Rescues this human being from her ‘freakish’ place in history and gives her life the respect it deserves.” —The Times-Picayune

“[Hottentot Venus] conjures the pain of some of the most sensitive and hurtful relations between the powerful and the powerless whatever their color, whatever their gender. . . . In this chilling and mournful novel, Chase-Riboud brings back to life a woman whose existence as a symbol has obscured her essence.” –The Washington Post
   
“Ultimately Hottentot Venus is about resurrection. For through the novel, Barbara Chase-Riboud has restored Sarah Baartman’s life, her name, her voice, her humanity.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Baartman’s brief, eventful saga is chronicled in harrowing factual and fictional detail in Chase-Riboud’s well-researched, unsparing book.” –Seattle Times
 
“Barbara Chase-Riboud, best known as the author of Sally Hemings tackles another hot-button historical incident in Hottentot Venus.” –Essence
  
“Barbara Chase-Riboud’s extraordinary novel recovers this riveting story of cultural voyeurism and physical cruelty with unblinking historical verisimilitude, ennobling pathos, and unerring narrative pace. This is an important book that lodges in the conscience like a nacre.” –David Levering-Lewis, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963

“Chase-Riboud plunges right into Baartman’s ambivalent heart and conjures up a character who is sharp, winning and true.” –The Plain Dealer
 
“Praise to Chase-Riboud for her total immersion in the spirit of Sarah Baartman.” –Booklist

“An extraordinary book by an extraordinary woman. . . . By virtue of beautiful pacing and writing, the novel is an exalting experience for the reader; and it rises to such heights at the end, that we experience a true epiphany. Like Beloved and Cry the Beloved Country, this book is essential.” –Carolyn Kizer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Yin

“Chase-Riboud’s talent is the ability to write historical fiction that is meticulously detailed, descriptive and imagines the internal geography of those she writes about. . . . Persuasive, heartbreaking.” –Black Issues Book Review

“Expertly recreates Baartman’s spirit. . . . Chase-Riboud [is] a savvy documentarian and powerful storyteller.” –The San Diego Union Tribune

“A compelling story about racism and sexism and European imperialism, a story about the cruelty of curiosity that, in the end, should force many people to take a long hard look at themselves.” –Ebony


Review

Praise for Barbara Chase-Riboud

?Any book by Chase-Riboud is bound to be a knock-down, drag-out good read.? ?Washington Times

?Barbara Chase-Riboud writes with a quill of eloquence that is indeed a sword, sounding with the spirituality of Toni Morrison and the passion of Charles Dickens.? ?Elaine Brown, author of A Taste of Power and The Condemnation of Little B.

Praise for Sally Hemings

?Barbara Chase-Riboud is a consummate artist. She invites the reader to consider if resistance and submission can be employed as instruments to live through hazardous times. In a startling book, Chase-Riboud has shown us the cruelty of slavery and the romance of love . . . She has determined to keep us honest about history and give us a great read.? ?Maya Angelou, author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
?This is one of the great American stories and it is admirably told.? ?New York Times

?Unforgettable ? Extremely moving and poetic.? ?The New Republic

?An act of great daring ? Deeply moving.? ?Chicago Sun-Times

?Exquisitely crafted ? A sensitive life study of a truly extraordinary woman: complex, courageous, irresistibly attractive ? elegantly self-possessed.? ?Cosmopolitan
Praise for Echo of Lions
?Echo of Lions gives us Barbara Chase-Riboud's characteristic awesome research and brilliant dramatization of, I think, the most gripping, significant and epic saga that a century of slaveships ever produced." ?Alex Haley, author of Roots
Praise for The President?s Daughter

?Chase-Riboud's passion for history and her obsession with the contradictions of sex and race that underlay the founding of the union bring great richness to The President's Daughter." ?San Francisco Chronicle

FROM THE PUBLISHER

From the bestselling author of Sally Hemings comes an extraordinary new novel based on the true story of Sarah Baartman, a South African herdswoman exhibited as a "scientific curiosity" in the capitals of nineteenth-century Europe. [end box]

Barbara Chase-Riboud's previous historical novels won her critical praise and established her as a writer who daringly transforms the hidden truths of the past into compelling fiction. In Hottentot Venus, Chase-Riboud recounts the tragic life of Sarah Baartman, re-creating in vivid, shocking detail the racism and sexism at the heart of European imperialism.

Born in the colony of Good Hope, South Africa, in 1789, Sarah Baartman was taken to London at the age of twenty by an English surgeon, who promised her fame and fortune. Dubbed the "Hottentot Venus," she was paraded naked in Piccadilly in a freak-show exhibition and subjected to the unabashed stares and crude comments of the British public, which resulted in a sensational trial for her custody by British abolitionists. Soon afterward, however, Baartman's keeper - who may have been her husband - sold her to a French circus owner. In 1814, her new owner took her to Paris as part of an exotic animal circus to be displayed to French high society. Baartman endured unconscionable exploitation and cruelty as medical experts and leading scientists touted her as an example of primitive evolution because of her genital "apron" and her prominent buttocks.

In an unforgettable saga that ranges from Capetown to St. Helena to London to Paris and back to Africa, Chase-Riboud has fashioned a Dickensian evocation of this icon of scientific racism, whose body, sex, and brain were exploited,examined, and dissected to become a synonym of ugliness and brutality -- the absolute negation of European beauty, which even today taints our Western concepts of humanity. Sarah, the tragic heroine, evokes nineteenth-century novels of the "other" such as Frankenstein, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and The Nigger of the Narcissus.

In Hottentot Venus, Barbara Chase-Riboud evokes this strange and moving story in the voices of Baartman and her contemporaries, combining years of research with the sensitivity and perceptions of a masterful storyteller to bring the story to life. Like Chang and Eng and the author's own Sally Hemings and Echo of Lions, Hottentot Venus is a powerful, stark portrayal of the harsh realities of race--a stunning look at the cruelty of curiosity, colonialism, and its twenty-first century consequences.

SYNOPSIS