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A wench originally simply meant a girl or young woman, but later became associated with mistresses and even later in the United States, a negress, especially one in service. Putting these last two meanings together did not give a favorable connotation to a female African American slave in the 1800s. This is a perfect title for this book which shows life from the perspective of four African American women in the 1850s who yearly traveled with their white slave masters from the South to a resort in Ohio as their mistresses. The novel deals with the treatment of these women as property with no rights at the mercy of their slave masters. It delineates the women's very different relationships with and feelings toward their masters, their reactions toward their (often mis-)treatment, and their struggles as slaves seeing the lives of other African Americans in a free state The author does a wonderful job of weaving a fictional story around this true setting in our country's history.