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
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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