O'Donovan aims to use the history of a small place – the southwestern corner of Georgia – to tell the big story of how slavery shaped – even determined – the ways African Americans experienced freedom. O'Donovan builds on the recent work of Steven Hahn, Dylan Penningroth, and others in emphasizing that “becoming free” was a process rooted very much in the contours of enslavement. But she goes a step further to argue that since slavery took different forms, so too did freedom. O'Donovan is brilliant at describing the hold enslavement had on freedpeople in this part of Georgia, especially on gender relations and the construction of households. Plantation agriculture came late and brutally here. Speculative planters brought young slaves from across Georgia and beyond to wrest profit from this fertile cotton frontier. Torn from kin and community, these slaves adapted a deeply gendered response to the new regime. Among planters that prized the brawn needed to fell trees, clear land, and break new ground, enslaved men accrued new value and new responsibilities as key laborers for their masters and as highly sought hirelings. As a result they claimed new power within the slave community. Women, meanwhile, were bound closer to the narrow domestic world of the frontier plantation, cut off from the established communities, towns, and free blacks that elsewhere constituted their public worlds. Largely isolated from the ravages of the Civil War, plantations here avoided the revolution of emancipation that tore through other parts of the South. Planter power and social relations among slaves remained largely untouched despite the coming of wage work. Indeed, O'Donovan powerfully argues that freedom strengthened existing power relations. Planters coveted the labor of the best male hands and eagerly evicted weaker women and their now burdensome babies. The only option available to freedwomen was to seek security in household labor units under the contractual – and increasingly patriarchal – authority of freedmen, upon whom planters relied to oversee the new free labor force. Planter domination extended to politics, where in Georgia black Reconstruction was delayed and destroyed before it really began. “As they passed through a war never quite realized into a freedom they never quite owned” (266), O'Donovan argues, freedpeople could still feel the grip of slavery. This excellent book makes a sober, disturbing, and much-needed contribution to our understanding of the power of enslavement and the limitations of freedom.