Kirkus review of Simulated Plantation

In Haynes’ novel, a contemporary Black woman travels back to the 1860s American South via a computer simulation.
Cory, a young Black computer engineer, gets stuck in a virtual simulation during a system test. The simulation gives her the body of a white man and drops her on the edge of a plantation in Alabama not long before President Lincoln’s election. Keeping her wits about her as she searches for an off-switch that will return her to real life, she convinces the plantation owner, Fairlamb, that she is Henry Martin, a tutor for his young son, Mitchell. This ruse provides her with shelter, food, and income, but Cory can’t help but rage inside over Fairlamb’s oppression of the enslaved people on his land. She can’t speak out, though, for fear of fatal retribution; if she dies in the simulation, what would that mean for the real Cory? Even worse, she finds herself growing close to the family, who believe her to be a white man.
Cory begins to question herself: Why does she care for this white, slaveholding family? What is the best way to help the enslaved people on the plantation when speaking out for them only brings more suffering? And why does any of this matter if it’s all just a simulation?
Haynes does an excellent job of locating the reader right on an 1860s plantation, using real historical figures to great effect. Putting Cory in the body of a white man provides a unique perspective through which the author can explore Cory’s feelings about race and community. (“I didn’t like being in the body of a nineteenth-century white man.”)
A few narrative threads are picked up and then just as quickly dropped (as when the real Henry Martin appears), despite the sense that they should have some narrative importance outside the chapters they’re contained within. Despite this, it’s impossible not to get drawn into Cory’s story and hope for her rescue.
A modern twist on a classic time-travel trope that interrogates race, gender, and history in a unique way. Takeaway: Immersive story confronts injustice through lived experience.