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Summary
Summary
From internationally bestselling author Tracy Chevalier, a riveting drama of a pioneer family on the American frontier
1838: James and Sadie Goodenough have settled where their wagon got stuck - in the muddy, stagnant swamps of northwest Ohio. They and their five children work relentlessly to tame their patch of land, buying saplings from a local tree man known as John Appleseed so they can cultivate the fifty apple trees required to stake their claim on the property. But the orchard they plant sows the seeds of a long battle. James loves the apples, reminders of an easier life back in Connecticut; while Sadie prefers the applejack they make, an alcoholic refuge from brutal frontier life.
1853: Their youngest child Robert is wandering through Gold Rush California. Restless and haunted by the broken family he left behind, he has made his way alone across the country. In the redwood and giant sequoia groves he finds some solace, collecting seeds for a naturalist who sells plants from the new world to the gardeners of England. But you can run only so far, even in America, and when Robert's past makes an unexpected appearance he must decide whether to strike out again or stake his own claim to a home at last.
Chevalier tells a fierce, beautifully crafted story in At the Edge of the Orchard , her most graceful and richly imagined work yet.
Author Notes
Tracy Chevalier was born on October 19, 1962 in Washington, D.C. After receiving a B.A. in English from Oberlin College, she moved to England in 1984 where she worked several years as a reference book editor. Leaving her job in 1993, she began a year-long M.A in creative writing at the University of East Anglia.
She is the author of several novels including The Virgin Blue, Burning Bright, Remarkable Creatures, and The Last Runaway. Her novel Girl with a Pearl Earring was made into a film starring Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Chevalier may not be able to trump her wildly successful second novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, but her eighth outing is a compelling showcase of 19th-century American pioneering spirit in which a family from Connecticut struggles to establish an apple orchard in the swamplands of Ohio. James Goodenough can trace his family and his beloved Golden Pippin apples back to England, though he seeks his own future away from his family's farm. The story of his adventure going west unfolds from his point of view as well as from that of Sadie, his contentious wife, a tough woman with a wild libido and a hankering for applejack. True-life figure John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) plays a role in the Goodenoughs' fortunes, as does British plant collector William Lobb, who becomes a key figure to James and Sadie's youngest son, Robert, when circumstances force him to flee Ohio and make his own life on the West Coast. Against a backdrop of family travails in Ohio and personal revelations in California come intriguing facts about apples, such as their division into "eaters" and "spitters" (used for apple cider and applejack), as well as how American pine trees, redwoods, and Sequoias were painstakingly introduced to England. The author's insightful observations about domestic life and the pull of relationships bring depth to a family story that inevitably comes full circle in a most satisfying way. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Spanning 15 years and a journey from the Black Swamp of northeastern Ohio to California's redwood forests, Chevalier's (The Last Runaway, 2013, etc.) latest draws readers into the simple highs and the frequent lows of 19th-century pioneer life. When it comes to apples, James Goodenough "craved them more than whiskey or tobacco or coffee or sex." His supplier of seeds and saplings, John Chapman (the real-life Johnny Appleseed) provides trees, applejack, and life-saving wisdom for the Goodenough family. After nine years (and five deceased children) in the Black Swamp, John and his wife, Sadie, are at odds, he preferring to grow sweet apples, or "eaters," she preferring to grow sour apples, or "spitters," that can be made into cider and applejack. Sadie's mean streak and taste for alcohol drive the family to a breaking point before the narrative skips ahead to their youngest son Robert's solo journey across the West. The strongest part of the novel, which depicts the crackling rage and poignant struggle of the Goodenough's swamp-orchard life, comes to an end too soon, and readers are catapulted onto the road with Robert before it's made clear why he left home. Separated by a series of letters Robert writes home to his siblings, the Ohio and California portions of the novel seem almost to be two different books. The relief of Robert's escape from a dysfunctional childhood is contrasted with his crushing loneliness and his longing for Goodenough apples that can't be found outside the swamp. Nonfictional details bring the novel authenticity, often at the expense of character development or narrative cohesion. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In 1838, James and Sadie Goodenough leave the relative comforts of Connecticut to strike out on their own, ending up in the swamps of Ohio. Required to plant 50 trees in order to stake a claim, they and their five children work tirelessly to cultivate the land, buying their seedlings from Johnny Appleseed, who tells Sadie how to make applejack, an alcoholic beverage she grows a little too fond of. The backbreaking work and relentless winters take a terrible toll on the couple, who are forever fighting, and after an unfortunate and tragic accident, their youngest child, Robert, takes off for California. There he finds work with a naturalist collecting seeds from the giant sequoia trees, which are then packed and shipped to England. He thoroughly enjoys the work, not least because he learned so much about trees from his father, but memories of his unhappy childhood continue to haunt him. Chevalier (The Last Runaway, 2013) excels at creating a highly accessible read that takes a surprisingly dark look at the brutal conditions of frontier life. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The best-selling Chevalier is the author of seven previous novels, including Girl with a Pearl Earring, which has been translated into 39 languages and made into an Oscar-nominated film.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IT CAN'T BE GREAT, even for a best-selling author, to find out that a second best-selling author has also written a new novel about a family's obsession with its apple orchard. Think of the potential for confusion. Or all the weak "how do you like them apples" jokes that might have to be endured at readings. But the latest Tracy Chevalier and Jane Hamilton novels, stylistically distinct, respectively, as plot-heavy historical fiction and leisurely evocative contemporary literature, form a complementary double feature. Paired, they make the case that the beautiful lunacy of trying to earn a living from the land hasn't changed all that much in the last two centuries. "They were fighting over apples again" is the opening sentence of Chevalier's "At the Edge of the Orchard," and for the first third of the book, that's about the extent of what happens. Chevalier (best known for her Vermeer novel, "Girl With a Pearl Earring") interweaves the lives of two real people, John Chapman, known as Johnny Appleseed, and the plant collector William Lobb, with that of her fictional characters. The Goodenoughs are introduced living a miserable life in 1838 in the Great Black Swamp of Ohio, where they got stuck in the mud on their way west. James would have happily stayed on his family's farm in Connecticut, where the apple of choice was the Golden Pippin, but his kinsmen were short on land as well as patience for his slatternly wife, Sadie, and now he's desperate to meet the requirement for a settler to claim land, namely cultivating an orchard of 50 fruit trees. James and Sadie disagree on how the goal should be met. He likes "eaters," particularly the apples he's grafted with scions of those Golden Pippins. Sadie sides with Chapman on favoring "spitters," suitable for making cider and applejack, and when Chapman drops by with more saplings or a jug or two of the good stuff, he and Sadie get drunk and have a fine old time. ("At the Edge of the Orchard" may be the first novel inspired by Michael Pollan; Chevalier credits his chapter on apples in "The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World" with providing "the seed" for this book.) It's something of a narrative mishmash. From James's third-person perspective Chevalier succeeds in creating a sympathetic character, even though when it comes to Sadie or his five children (there were 10 in all; five died of swamp fever) he never met a rod he wanted to spare. With Sadie, she takes an unfortunate first-person deep dive into the mind of a younger version of Granny from "The Beverly Hillbillies": "I'd hear new settlers complain bout the mud and think, Theres worse things than mud. Jest you wait." Indeed. The Goodenoughs get and give more than their fair share of those worse things, and it's a relief when the story veers off to follow the most alert of their malnourished children, Robert, on his own westward journey. Even his sweet, sad epistolary accounts of many failed employment efforts (snake oil salesman's assistant, gold miner, stableboy) are a diversion after the brutal, bloody realism of the swamp. By the time Robert falls in with Lobb and starts a whole new relationship with trees, collecting seeds and saplings from redwoods and sequoias to send to wealthy Europeans, this feels like a different book. Chevalier puts the reader in those quiet, magnificent groves right along with Robert. Atmospherically, Chevalier is a gifted conjurer of, say, the sweaty, unwashed bedding of 19th-century America. But "At the Edge of the Orchard" is a bumpy wagon ride, a slog through mud followed by a mad gallop, including some ludicrous trips up and down a mountainside. There's even some slapstick action involving, first, vastly pregnant women and then babies. At the end, the sudden lurch toward improbable happiness nearly gave me whiplash, but undeniably, I found it pleasing. The first third of "At the Edge of the Orchard" is as sour as a spitter, but the rest is an entertaining gobble. MICHAEL POLLAN DIDN'T inspire "The Excellent Lombards" - more likely it was Jane Hamilton's life on her husband's Wisconsin orchard - but he would probably appreciate her tender, astute look behind the scenes at a small-scale family farm in the years when the locavore movement was just taking hold. The Lombards raise sheep, but primarily they're an extended family of apple farmers, headed by two cousins, Jim and Sherwood, and a maiden-aunt type named May Hill. Jim's wife, Nellie, designates the day the apple blossoms hit their peak as an informal school holiday: Blossom Day. When it arrives, she dispatches her children, William and Mary Frances, to the orchard with a picnic and an unspoken order to enjoy the beauty they find there. Although Mary Frances resists or ignores most of her mother's wishes, this one she embraces. For her, Blossom Day means to be dazed, drunk even, on such natural joys as "the air still, nothing in it but bees working." It's the 1990s, and although Mary Frances is only 12 when the novel starts, she's already plotting to stay in this place for the rest of her days. That is, if family dynamics allow it. "The Excellent Lombards" is about possession, succession and the uneasy balance of power between multigenerational farmers. Mary Frances goes by many names - Francie to her mother, Marlene to her father, Frankie or Imp to her brother - but as expertly rendered by Hamilton (whose many novels include "A Map of the World" and "The Book of Ruth") she's a storybook character, an inquisitive, imperious but lovable girl akin to Harper Lee's Jean Louise Finch, Rumer Godden's Cecil Grey or Ian McEwan's Briony Tallis. Like them, she absorbs and channels emotion and drama, processing it for the reader as a vested outsider: an outsider because she's a child, but vested because she wants to have this land, and the life she lives on it, remain unchanged forever. The kid can be pretty obnoxious. She freezes out a gentleman farmer because he grows a newfangled apple, the Honeycrisp, rather than heirloom varieties (and because he's more successful than the Lombards). But she's also an amusing narrator, scoffing at the "righteous" mothers looking only for organic fruit at the farmers' market and refusing to hear a word in defense of the common sense of integrated pest management: "Those mothers only wished us to know that we were the individuals poisoning their children and Gaia." Because Mary Frances' framework for farming, and her love of it, is so obviously shaped by and inseparable from her adoration of her father, it's not hard to forgive her. Or feel sorry for her. Her way of life is in jeopardy, from the pressure of encroaching development and the trendy Honeycrisps, as well as the chronic disagreements between Jim and Sherwood, instigated by the fact that Sherwood grew up on the farm and Jim did not. What Mary Frances doesn't understand - yet - is that this is a repeating cycle. When Mary Frances' distant cousin Phillip, "a slow-food, locavoring, hipper-than-Alice-Waters pioneer," arrives at the orchard after college and has the temerity to care about the place, she sees him as an interloper, proving she's a Sherwood in the making. Somewhere back in this family's history there were those first treasured saplings. And somewhere in the excellent Lombard family future, a son or daughter could be sent off with nothing more than scion wood. Only there's not much wilderness left, not even in the Great Black Swamp. Maybe the best hope is that at least they'll care enough to be fighting about apples again. Two novels about possession, succession and the balance of power in farming families. MARY POLS writes about agriculture for The Portland Press Herald and is the author of a memoir, "Accidentally on Purpose."
Library Journal Review
Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring) pulls no punches with this hard-hitting tale of a pioneer family that can't ever seem to get ahead. In 1838 the Goodenough family settle into the Black Swamp of northern Ohio and have a go at planting apple trees, aided by the traveling salesman known as Johnny Appleseed. James Goodenough cares for his apple trees better than he does his ten children (half of whom have died), savoring the sweet apples they produce. His wife, Sadie, however, only likes the trees when the apples are bitter, making them ideal for turning into alcohol and giving her an escape from the life she detests. Told from alternating viewpoints and letters, this tale of rough, rugged living sucks listeners in with four distinct voice talents: Hillary Huber, Mark Bramhall, Kirby Heyborne, and Cassandra Morris. Every drawl, whistle, and song brings the Black Swamp and the Goodenough family to life for listeners. VERDICT Meticulously researched, heartbreakingly beautiful, deceptively simple, and superbly narrated; another must-listen from the queen of historical fiction. ["This novel paints a vivid picture of the hard and rough-hewn life of American pioneers on their Westward journey": LJ 2/15/16 starred review of the Viking hc.]-Erin Cataldi, Johnson Cty. P.L., Franklin, IN © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.