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.
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[THEY WERE FIGHTING OVER apples again]***
(The Borough Press, 8 March 2016, copy provided by the publisher via NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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I found this book totally absorbing.
Chevalier knows her stuff. The world of the characters and the historical period really come to live. Her prose is rich, detailed and flawless. It was a joy to read this book. The setting became a character in the novel like the moors in Wuthering Heights (I disliked the book but oh, those moors gave me shivers).
This is a complex book with multiple narrators and different timelines but the author pulls this off with ease. I wasn't lost or bewildered once. I love complex narratives with time shifts and multiple narrators and when it doesn't go well the whole book can be a bewildering mess. That's not the case here.
The characters are complex; light, dark, human, flawed, neither perfect or nasty. I was fascinated by dysfunctional relationship between James and Sadie, they have such opposing views it was surprising they were still married. I often wondered why they stayed together and in Black Swamp, a place of such misery.
