I mean, they look like their little European girls on their way to go shopping or something. And they’re dressed in these little pretty dresses and they have capes and hats. And I stumbled upon this beautiful picture in 1860, one of three sisters and they’re probably four, five, six years of age. I was actually planning to do the historical novel and I was looking for information on plantations in Virginia. Trisha Thomas: I based this story on a photograph that I found. GP Gottlieb: Did you base this story on a real person? And if so, can you say more about what you learned? The two kind gentlemen take her home with them, and it takes some time for Dahlia to understand both the life she chose and the consequences of being a runaway slave with a bounty on her head. Moments later, when chaos erupts because of a nearby bank robbery, the town is forcibly cleared, and she can’t find her family.

Afraid to give her real name, she invents a new one. During a special 16th birthday outing to the city, Dahlia gets separated from her sisters and grandmother, and two young Englishmen come to her rescue. With suspicions of her true identity growing and a bounty hunter not far behind, Dahlia must act fast or pay a devastating price.What Passes for Love tells the coming of age story of Dahlia Holt, a beautiful sixteen-year-old slave whose father is the white plantation owner. But when Bo arrives on the estate in shackles, Dahlia decides to risk everything to save his life. She also knows she’ll never have this chance at freedom again.Įnsconced in the Ross mansion, Dahlia soon finds herself held captive in a different way - as the dutiful wife of a young man who has set his sights on a political future. Reinventing herself as Lily Dove, Dahlia allows Timothy to believe she’s white, with no family to speak of, and agrees to marry him. Ten years later, Dahlia meets Timothy Ross, an Englishman in need of a wife. Forced to leave behind her best friend, Bo, she lives in a world between black and white, belonging to neither. When Dahlia’s father, the owner of Vesterville plantation, takes her to work in his home as a servant, she’s desperately lonely. I was six years old the day Lewis Holt came to take me away.īorn into slavery, Dahlia never knew her mother - or what happened to her. A young woman pays a devastating price for freedom in this heartrending and breathtaking novel of the nineteenth-century South.ġ850.

What passes as love by trisha r thomas