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
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
