The novel is about Moinette Antoine, a beautiful and self-educated slave of mixed race living in Louisiana in the early to mid-19th century.
The first-person narration is done in a stream of consciousness style that focuses on Moinette's insightful thoughts and impressions of the strange and brutal world around her.
The catalyst for the author, Susan Straight, to write A Million Nightingales was a story told to her by an African American neighbor.
He told her that the reason why he had moved from Louisiana to Riverside, California (Straight's hometown) in 1953 was to protect his young, beautiful daughter from an older white man who was going "to come and get her."
Straight became obsessed with the story, "I couldn't show [my daughter] the piece of paper in my desk, the copy of the sale of Manon.
"[4] The title of the novel is contained within its epigraph, "I have a million nightingales on the branches of my heart singing freedom," which is taken from a musical adaptation, by Vocolot, of the poem "Defiance" by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
In the background story of this novel and the previous one, FX's mother and four other girls escaped from rural Louisiana to live in Riverside, California after the local plantation owner raped three of them in 1958.
After Céphaline unexpectedly dies, Moinette is sold to Laurent de la Rosière, the owner of another sugarcane plantation.
The first-person narration is done in a stream of consciousness style that focuses on Moinette's insightful thoughts and impressions of the strange and brutal world around her.
[14] Megan Marshall, writing for The New York Times Book Review, praised the book for being a “richly complicated narrative”…“a powerful and moving story, written in language so beautiful you can almost believe the words themselves are capable of salving history's wounds.”[9] Other reviews also praised the novel for its lyrical language, strong narrative, and convincing depiction of antebellum plantation life.
[6][10][15][16] The critic for the Women's Review of Books gave the novel high praise, "I came away feeling I had not only encountered people whose stories mattered but that I had gained crucial insight into America's past.
However, the critic also thought that the novel "effectively evokes the conflicted mélange of races, nationalities and cultures that defined the early 19th-century territory.
"[8] The critic from Library Journal thought that the story was "passionately imagined," but that readers "not caught up in the character's emotional world may find the overall effect dissipated" due to the narrative style and use of non-English words.
She thought that the novel was trying too hard to be a serious work, that Straight "constricts her heroine within webs of phrasing so self-conscious that we can forget we're in 19th century Louisiana and believe, instead, that we're sitting in on a writer's workshop.