An often mesmerizing look at a unique group of Americans.
A historical novel that explores the precarious position of pacifist Shakers during the American Civil War.
Austin Innes left his home, in what would later be Oklahoma, at an early age and took to a shiftless life of temporary romances. A group of strangers who call themselves Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing—and whom others simply call the Shakers—show him great kindness while giving him a boat ride. He ultimately joins their community in South Union, Kentucky, and becomes a schoolmaster. Meanwhile, Harry Littlebourne, a young Native American man of uncertain extraction, leaves the land in Ohio that his Quaker father left him and wanders into the same Shaker territory. He’s remarkably tight-lipped and almost childlike in his simplicity; Austin becomes his mentor, and they jointly assume a similar role for Amos Anger, a young orphan in town. But as the conflict between North and South crescendos, the Shakers are forced into a seemingly impossible quandary. As committed pacifists, they want to remain neutral and avoid military conscription by either side. They also staunchly believe in the equality of black people, who live freely among them, which complicates their efforts to stay out of the war. Austin wrestles with this predicament on his own; despite his unwavering devotion to his religious principles, he feels drawn to participating in the conflict, as he’s uncomfortable with the idea of being a passive witness. Meanwhile, Shaker locals Harvey Eades and Elder John Rankin write a letter to President Abraham Lincoln anxiously requesting an exemption from military service even as more of the community’s members elect to join the fray. In her debut novel, Stevens masterfully explains the complex contours of the Shaker predicament. For example, any assertion of neutrality led to their members being depicted as “collaborators or cowards.” She also shows how the Confederates found even more fuel for their disdain: “Slave and slaveholder alike received kind attention at Shaker hands, and it was chiefly this that the secessionists found intolerable.” Shakers were apparently known for their painstaking record-keeping, and most of the plot is based closely on the real-life journals of Eldress Nancy E. Moore and Elder Harvey Eades. The author’s historical research is impressively rigorous, and she nimbly brings to life the moral struggle of an intriguing, little-understood group of Americans. Furthermore, she ably dramatizes the plight of Kentucky—a state with no deficit of supporters for either side of the war—as its government also tried desperately to remain neutral. The chief failing of the book, however, is its pacing, as the plot unfolds too languorously; it also introduces a new, major subplot late in the story. Stevens is at her best when painting the big picture—the grand drama of the war and the specific tribulations of the Shakers, who loved their country but remained culturally separate from it. It’s hard to recall a fictional exploration of the Shakers that’s more historically searching or sensitive.
An often mesmerizing look at a unique group of Americans.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-9997517-0-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
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