San Miguel

July 30, 2012
On New Year’s Day 1888, the ailing Marantha Waters sails across San Francisco Bay to remote San Miguel Island with her second husband and adopted daughter in hopes that the fresh air will restore her health. Marantha and her family, city folk by nature, risk the last of her inheritance on a farm lashed by wind and rain; removed from the pleasant distractions of late Victorian society and thrust into primitive living conditions, the Waters find themselves left with little to do but discover the strengths and weaknesses in themselves and in each other. Decades later during the Depression, Elise and Herbie Lester take over the farm and undergo their own transformations. Ripe with exhaustively researched period detail, Boyle’s epic saga of struggle, loss, and resilience (after When the Killing’s Done) tackles Pacific pioneer history with literary verve. The author subtly interweaves the fates of Native Americans, Irish immigrants, Spanish and Italian migrant workers, and Chinese fishermen into the Waters’ and the Lesters’ lives, but the novel is primarily a history of the land itself, unchanging despite its various visitors and residents, and as beautiful, imperfect, and unrelenting as Boyle’s characters. Agent: Georges Borchardt.

August 15, 2012
The prolific author's latest is historical, not only in period and subject matter, but in tone and ponderous theme. The 14th novel from Boyle returns to the Channel Islands off the coast of California, a setting which served him so well in his previous novel (When the Killing's Done, 2011). Some of the conflicts are similar as well--man versus nature, government regulation versus private enterprise--but otherwise this reads more like a novel that is a century or more old, like a long lost work from the American naturalist school of Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, both of whom saw mankind caught in mechanistic forces and nature as something other than the Eden of innocence so often romanticized. The novel tenuously connects the stories of two families who move, 50 years apart, to the isolation of the title island, in order to tend to a sheep ranch. For Marantha Waters, the symbolically fraught pilgrimage with her husband and daughter in 1888--on "New Year's Day, the first day of her new life, and she was on an adventure...bound for San Miguel Island and the virginal air Will insisted would make her well again"--is one of disillusionment and determination. Even the passage of time feels like a loss of innocence: "The days fell away like the skin of a rotten fruit"; "The next day sheared away like the face of a cliff crashing into the ocean and then there was another day and another." The ravages of the natural world (and their own moral natures) take their toll on the family, who are belatedly succeeded in the 1930s by a similar one, as newlyweds anticipate their move west as "the real life they were going into, the natural life, the life of Thoreau and Daniel Boone, simple and vigorous and pure." Reinforcing their delusions is national press attention, which made much of their "pioneering, that is, living like the first settlers in a way that must have seemed romantic to people inured to the grid of city streets and trapped in the cycle of getting and wanting and getting all over again." What may seem to some like paradise offers no happy endings in this fine novel.

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April 1, 2012

In 1888, Marantha Waters moves to the desolate isle of San Miguel Island off Southern California's coast with her Civil War veteran husband, who does everything he can to keep their aspiring-actress daughter from slipping off to the mainland. In 1930, New York City librarian Elise Lester and her gung-ho World War I veteran husband settle on San Miguel, also looking for peace. Sharp moral conundrum in a distinctive setting; with an eight-city tour.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2012
This novel is based on the true stories of three women from two families who raised sheep on windswept San Miguel, one of California's Channel Islands. (Boyle's When the Killing's Done, 2011, was set on nearby Anacapa and Santa Cruz.) Tuberculosis sufferer Marantha Waters arrives in 1888, hoping for a cure but finding that her domineering husband, a Civil War veteran, is more concerned with profit; daughter Edith tries repeatedly to escape to San Francisco. The Lester family fares better. Elsie and Herbie take over the operation in the 1930s and find bliss; the story of the Swiss Family Lester captivates the nation. Still, Herbie's depressionhe's a veteran of WWIshadows their happiness. As ever, Boyle's prose is vivid and precise, and he imbues his subjects with wonderful complexity. The perils and pleasures of island living, the limits to natural resources, and the echoes of war all provide ample grist for his mill. Wired-in readers will find food for thought as the Lesters' solitude is broadcast to and invaded by a hungry nation. An episodic structure slows the momentum slightly, but it's a richly rewarding read nonetheless. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A critical favorite with loyal fans, Boyle found wider success with The Women (2009); expect major media coverage and crowds at his tour stops.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)