An enchanting examination of bloodlines, legacy and the myriad branches of a diverse family tree.
A buried, early-19th-century diary, the fragrance of wild white roses and the rustling of river-cane reeds bring to life this refreshing debut novel by Miles, a winner of a MacArthur Fellowship (American Culture/Univ. of Michigan; The House on Diamond Hill, 2010, etc.).
Jennifer “Jinx” Micco, a Cherokee-Creek reporter for the Muscogee Nation News in Oklahoma, Cheyenne Cotterell, a wealthy interior designer and genealogy buff from Atlanta, and Ruth Mayes, a grief-stricken home-and-garden magazine writer from Minneapolis, investigate their possible ties to the Hold House, a Cherokee plantation in the North Georgia foothills once inhabited by Cherokee-Scottish Chief James Vann Hold, his two wives, his many children and his African-American slaves. Early in the novel, the pre–Trail of Tears history of Cherokee slaveholders and Christian missionaries overwhelms the narrative. But the pace picks up after Jinx and Cheyenne discover the 1815 diary belonging to missionary Anna Rosina Gamble, whose detailed account of her and her pastor husband’s establishment of a Moravian church on the plantation, along with her relationship with her favorite pupil, Mary Ann Battis, upends everything Jinx, Cheyenne and Ruth thought they knew about their heritage. Anna’s vibrant voice is the most dynamic in the novel: “Our hope of bringing the Gospel here has yet to find fertile ground. It looks very dark in this land.” And it’s through Anna’s entries that Miles’ keen understanding of Cherokee slave owners and the braided lineages of Cherokee Indians and African-Americans shines through.
An enchanting examination of bloodlines, legacy and the myriad branches of a diverse family tree.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-89587-635-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: John F. Blair
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
Yet another rich, rewarding novel from Britain's acclaimed Crace (Arcadia, 1992, etc.), this set in an 1830s English coastal town where an early winter storm brings unexpected visitors and, for some, unsettling complications. The people of Wherrytown wake up to find a Yankee ship, the Belle of Wilmington, mastless and stuck in the sand outside their harbor. At the same time, the coastal steamer on its regular run has brought to town Aymer Smith, a London soap-maker whose liberal views and pedantic manner soon put off everyone he meets. He's come in person to inform area soda-ash suppliers, and his firm's agent, that their services are no longer needed; but when the American crewcomplete with the captain's injured black slavecome to the inn where Aymer's also lodging, he awakens to a new sense of purpose. He sets the African free, and, flushed with thoughts of the blushing bride whom the inn's overcrowding has forced to share his room (with her husband), thinks to end his long bachelorhood by marrying the teenaged daughter of one of his ash suppliers. Aymer's humane gestures are not welcome, however, as the slave's owner assaults him, and his intended quickly makes clear her preference for a Yankee sailor, planning to go off with him when the Belle is seaworthy. Floated off the sand and ready after a week's frantic repair, the ship sails with her rowdy crew, the sailor's girl, the newlyweds as emigrants to Canada, and even the ship's dog, which had adopted Aymer and become his only friend. A last visit for consolation to the girl's mother, now alone, results instead in the loss of his virginity, leaving him a changed man when he returns to the city. Human nature in all its tangled glory is quietly but powerfully evoked, along with a tangy, lasting impression of the intricate life of those who dwell between land and sea.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-26379-5
Page Count: 277
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
A chorus line of freaks throughout the ages parades here in a determinedly sympathetic but thin and clumsily all-inclusive debut from poet Ditchoff. From the favored dwarves of the Pharaohs to an American hermaphrodite looking back from the 1970s at his/her celebrated career in Weimar Berlin, the narrative winds its way through ancient, medieval, and modern times, lingering for emphasis on the more famous cases. Screaming curses, the hunchback Aesop, favorite of King Croesus, is thrown to his death at Delphi after angering the powers-that-be; bearded Princess Wilgefortis is martyred in fifth-century Lusitania for preferring Christianity to her royal betrothed; dwarf Sir Jeffrey Hudson attains unusual heights of influence as the Queen's trusted courier in the 17th-century court of Charles I in London; and Catherine the Great of Russia seduces the giant Nikita and bears his son. Once the scene shifts to America, the images of similar ``prodigies'' are associated exclusively with more popular entertainments: P.T. Barnum, Barnum & Bailey, Ringling Bros., and ultimately Hollywood (in Tod Browning's controversial film Freaks of 1932). After the Depression and WW II, however, interest in sideshows waned, and with advances in medical technology, the physical aberrations themselves began to be ``fixed''a development regarded with horror by survivors of the close-knit carnival communities as being akin to Nazi cleansing efforts. But while a bevy of narrators interweave points of view to provide continuity as the pageant unfolds, the emphasis is on history rather than on the individuals, leaving no lasting, tangible impressions when all is said and done. Shallow furrows in a fallow field, these snippets and summaries make clear that the world of the malformed could richly reward more sustained efforts to fathom it.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56689-035-7
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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