A short tale that will satisfy a reader’s craving for Victorian pomp and family intrigue.
In Rodriguez’s historical novel, a young man is captivated by a mysterious young woman living on his father’s estate.
In Sea Girt, New Jersey in 1890, Joseph Johnson arrives from London to see the property that his wealthy industrialist father, Samuel, has developed on the American coast. Riding through the dunes, the 19-year-old comes across a two-room cabin that houses his father’s 18-year-old adopted daughter, Isabel. Before this visit, Joseph knew nothing about the young woman, whom his father apparently saved from drowning off the coast of Colombia when she was small. To be fair, Joseph knows almost nothing about Samuel, either, as the man left him back in England to be raised by a nurse; his mother “disappeared.” Samuel now expects Joseph to marry Elizabeth Edwards, the beautiful daughter of a local doctor. Joseph likes Elizabeth, but he can’t get his mind off the mysterious Isabel, who everyone claims has tuberculosis. Nor does he know that Isabel almost succeeded in poisoning Samuel to death when she was younger. Isabel is anything but welcoming, but as she and Joseph get to know each other, long-held secrets threaten to come to light. Rodriguez’s prose is modern in style while still effectively evoking the particularly Victorian tension of words unsaid and emotions repressed: “His father’s decision to keep the secret places of his past dark didn’t help, of course. Joseph bordered on obsession about who the man was, without new thoughts about this girl—holding the memories just out of his son’s reach was an effective form of torture.” This is a short novel at less than 160 pages, and the plot moves quickly across that span. Its milieu—coastal New Jersey and, in flashbacks, Cartagena, Colombia—feels familiar without drifting too far into historical clichés. By the end, readers may not feel particularly moved or enlightened, but the story of Joseph, Samuel, and Isabel is, on the whole, a pleasant way to pass an afternoon.
A short tale that will satisfy a reader’s craving for Victorian pomp and family intrigue.Pub Date: March 12, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 139
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic, but some will wish for more plot.
This historical fever dream of a novel follows the flight of a servant girl through the Colonial American wilderness, red in tooth and claw.
As in her last novel, Matrix (2021), Groff’s imaginative journey into a distant time and place is powered by a thrumming engine of language and rhythm. “She had chosen to flee, and in so choosing, she had left behind her everything she had, her roof, her home, her country, her language, the only family she had ever known, the child Bess, who had been born into her care when she was herself a small child of four years or so, her innocence, her understanding of who she was, her dreams of who she might one day be if only she could survive this starving time." Those onrushing sentences will follow the girl, “sixteen or seventeen or perhaps eighteen years of age,” through the wilderness surrounding the desperate colony, driven by famine and plague into barbarism, through the territory of “the powhatan and pamunkey” to what she hopes will be “the settlements of frenchmen, canada,” a place she once saw pointed out on a map. The focus is on the terrors of survival, the exigencies of starvation, the challenges of locomotion, the miseries of a body wounded, infected, and pushed beyond its limit. What plot there is centers on learning the reason for her flight and how it will end, but the book must be read primarily for its sentences and the light it shines on the place of humans in the order of the world. Whether she is eating baby birds and stealing the fluff from the mother’s nest to line her boots, having a little tea party with her meager trove of possessions, temporarily living inside a tree trunk that comes with a pantry full of grubs (spiders prove less tasty), or finally coming to rest in a way neither she nor we can foresee, immersion in the girl’s experience provides a virtual vacation from civilization that readers may find deeply satisfying.
The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic, but some will wish for more plot.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9780593418390
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
Intelligent and thoughtful but not quite at this groundbreaking writer’s usual level of excellence.
An obscure English novelist and a missing-heir trial are the real historical springboards for Smith’s latest fiction.
Eliza Touchet is cousin and housekeeper to William Ainsworth, whose novel Jack Sheppard once outsold Oliver Twist but who, by 1868, has been far eclipsed by his erstwhile friend Dickens. Widower William is about to marry his maid Sarah Wells, who has borne him a child. Characteristically, he leaves the arrangements to Eliza, who manages everything about his life except the novels he keeps cranking out, which his shrewd cousin knows are dreadful. The new Mrs. Ainsworth is obsessed with the man claiming to be Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to a family fortune who was reported drowned in a shipwreck. The Claimant, as he is called, is likely a butcher from Wapping, but Sarah is one of many working-class Britons who passionately defend him as a man of the people being done wrong by the toffs. Eliza gets drawn into the trial by her fascination with Andrew Bogle, formerly enslaved by the Tichbornes in Jamaica, who recognizes the Claimant as Sir Roger. A Roman Catholic in Protestant Britain and William’s former lover who's been supplanted by a younger woman, Eliza feels a connection to Bogle as a fellow outsider. (Some pointed scenes, however, make it clear that this sense of kinship is one-sided and that well-intentioned Eliza can be as patronizing as any other white Briton.) Smith alternates the progress of the trial with Eliza’s memories of the past, which include tart assessments of William’s circle of literary pals, who eventually make clear their disdain for his work, and intriguing allusions to her affair with William’s first wife and to her S&M sex with William. (Eliza wielded the whips.) It’s skillfully done, but the minutely detailed trial scenes provide more information than most readers will want, and a lengthy middle section recounting Bogle’s African ancestry and enslaved life, though gripping, further blurs the narrative’s focus. Historical fiction doesn’t seem to bring out Smith’s strongest gifts; this rather pallid narrative lacks the zest of her previous novels’ depictions of contemporary life.
Intelligent and thoughtful but not quite at this groundbreaking writer’s usual level of excellence.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780525558965
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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