A captivating gold-rush tale told from the viewpoint of an indomitable woman.
A New England woman builds a life in the rugged frontier of California in this gold-rush novel with elements of feminism and romance.
Elisabeth Goodwin’s comfortable life in her family’s home with an orchard in Concord, Massachusetts, comes to a cruel and abrupt end in 1847. Blight destroys the apple crop, and the family is forced to work in a textile mill. Desperate, her father, Henry, mortgages the farm and abandons the family to poverty, moving west as a trapper with the Hudson Company. Three years later, as news of the discovery of gold spreads around the world, Elisabeth follows with her new husband, Nathaniel Parker, resolved to find her father and his claim on the American River in Central California. When her father runs off, leaving her his gold claim, the promise of riches soon gives way to the reality of grueling work and disappointment. Married in haste and desperation, Elisabeth soon finds that her new husband is more interested in the burly gold miners than his wife. But inspired by the copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” that is her only tie to her childhood home, Elisabeth emerges from each daunting setback more determined to survive. Though her letters home to her childhood friend Louisa May Alcott are filled with lies about her successful life with an ideal family, Elisabeth fights to achieve independence and find passion and intimacy. As her struggles intensify, she comes to realize that, despite Emerson’s eloquent text, self-reliance is a different prospect altogether for a woman alone.
Voorsanger creates a memorable hero in Elisabeth as well as a vivid depiction of the rough-and-tumble frontier life of mid-19th-century California, which is characterized by equal parts boundless optimism and humiliating despair. The author’s language is evocative and beautifully apt both to period and subject, as when Elisabeth questions some miners about their claims: “The men split open up like a sack of beans then, spilling out tales of digging and finding just enough flecks to keep them fed.” Although Elisabeth’s reaction to her husband’s sexuality is harshly homophobic, Voorsanger displays sensitivity and compassion in Nate’s description of the shame and glory of his gay identity. The depiction of an all-male Fandango gathering, where rough miners dance, drink, and find comfort with one another, is a provocative piece of history, as is the portrayal of the plight of the Californios, the ancestral owners of the land whose proud status is delegitimized by the arrival of a flood of White prospectors. Elisabeth’s often thwarted desire for sexual intimacy is poignant, though many of the bodice-ripping sex scenes lack the subtlety that characterizes the other facets of the narrative. But overall, this work is a lucid portrait of the evolution of a strong woman in an “ambitious and urgent” period in California history.
A captivating gold-rush tale told from the viewpoint of an indomitable woman. (acknowledgements, author bio)Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-781-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A masterpiece.
Two young Indian writers discover their conjoined destinies by leaving home, coming back, connecting, disconnecting, and swimming in the ocean at Goa.
Sonia’s grandfather, the lawyer, and his friend, the Colonel, are connected by a weekly chess game and a local tradition of families sharing food, “paraded through the neighborhood in tiffin carriers, in thermos flasks, upon plates covered in napkins tied in rabbit ears.” Shortly after Desai’s magnificent third novel opens, the two families are also connected by a marriage proposal. Upon hearing that Sonia is feeling lonely at college in Vermont—loneliness? Is there anything more un-Indian?—and unaware that she is romantically involved with a famous, much older painter, her elders deliver a hilariously lukewarm letter proposing that she be introduced to Sonny, the Colonel’s grandson. Sonny is living in New York working as a copy editor at The Associated Press, and he, too, has a partner no one knows about. Sonny’s family feels they are being asked to give up their son to balance out some long-ago bad investment advice from the Colonel; on the other hand, they would very much like to get the other family’s kebab recipe. The fate of this half-hearted setup unfurls over many years and almost 700 delicious pages that the author has apparently been working on since the publication of The Inheritance of Loss (2006), which won the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. You can almost feel the decades passing as the novel becomes increasingly concerned with the process of novel-writing; toward the end, Sonia can’t stop thinking about whether, if she writes all the stories she knows, “these stories [would] intersect and make a book? How would they hold together?” Desai’s trust in her own process pays off, as vignettes of just a page or two (Sonia’s head-spinning tour of a museum with the great artist; Sonny’s lightning-strike theory that only people who have cleaned their own toilet can appreciate reading novels) intersect with the novel’s central obsessions—love, family, writing, the role of the U.S. in the Indian imagination, the dangers faced by a woman on her own—and come to a perfectly satisfying close.
A masterpiece.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780307700155
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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