The Rathbones

Starred review from May 20, 2013
A teenager comes of age and grapples with the heavy burdens of family secrets against the backdrop of the 19th-century New England whaling industry in this beautifully written, playful, and intricate debut novel. Fifteen-year-old Mercy Rathbone’s father, a whaler, has been away from home for nearly a decade, but Mercy holds out hope for his return. She happens to witness her mother coupling with a stranger, a scene that prompts Mercy and her cousin Mordecai to flee their home in panic. They embark on a journey of discovery that leads her to the truth about her missing brother and the rest of her family (the inclusion of several family trees with ever-spreading branches is a nice visual companion to the prose). Mercy’s travels alternate with flashbacks depicting her ancestors, beginning in 1761, with Moses, the first Rathbone, who had the gift of spotting a whale before any sign of it was visible. Clark creates evocative descriptions (a whale’s carcass is a “diminished hulk of patched black and rotted gray”), making her images and encounters between people especially vivid. Agent: Mollie Glick, Foundry Literary + Media.

June 15, 2013
Drawing on Edgar Allan Poe, Homer and Herman Melville, an ambitious saga of lineage and whaling in which Mercy and Mordecai Rathbone embark on a circular voyage in pursuit of their identities. Simultaneously mythic, gothic and whimsical, Clark's debut imagines the North American whaling industry through the lens of an eccentric, male-dominated dynasty springing from Moses Rathbone, discovered at sea in a barrel in 1761. With his combination of maritime skills and instinct, Moses systematically breeds a line of sons who will harvest untold numbers of sperm whales and generate enormous wealth. Wives are stolen and spurned, girl children mysteriously absent. But the arc of the Rathbone supremacy declines, as does the whale population, and by the time Mercy sets off in 1859 with her cousin Mordecai to look for Mercy's father and her mysterious twin brother, and also escape the man chasing her from Rathbone House, the family's history has begun to be covered by the sands of time. Clark imagines a rich hinterland to her briny story, yet the episodic foreground is desultory, with the cousins wandering among islands in the Atlantic, responding numbly to dark, sometimes opaque discoveries. Eventually returning to Rathbone House, Mercy excavates the last complicated layer of her family's bonds and bids several goodbyes and one hello. Chicago-based author Clark seduces with her vision and her prose but disappoints with non-epic storytelling.

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July 1, 2013

A widow's walk atop a crumbling mansion where beautiful haunted women wait in vain for their men to return from the sea; a family's mysterious past, their fortunes gained and lost; and a journey back in time. All this (and more) describes debut author Clark's saga of the whales and the water. In 1850s Connecticut, young Mercy Rathbone and her Uncle Mordecai embark on a coastal journey. They uncover unimaginable family secrets: 100 years earlier, patriarch Moses Rathbone, a seafaring shipbuilder, was also a much married husband and fruitful father. He amassed a whaling empire that slowly eroded under curious circumstances. Mercy and Mordecai, the two remaining Rathbones, take on the complex task of finding pieces of the family's story and fitting them back together. Written with a deft hand, the novel returns to a time in American history when great communities of mariners understood the power of the sea and the creatures within. VERDICT At once sprawling, ambitious, and tightly woven, this gothic tale is shrouded in longing and loss, with hints of the supernatural woven throughout. Readers of epic family sagas will find it both compelling and captivating. [See Prepub Alert, 3/18/13.]--Susanne Wells, Indianapolis

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2013
Fleeing from a mysterious man in blue, 15-year-old Mercy Rathbone and her cousin, Mordecai, set off on a near-epic odyssey that will take them in search of the girl's whaler father, who has been missing for nine years, and for the twin brother she has never known. Set in the mid-nineteenth century, their journey traverses space and time, too, as numerous flashbacks fill in the history of the legendary Rathbone family. The Rathbone men seem to have an almost preternatural affinity for the sea and have made a fortune from whaling. But by the time the novel begins, the whales are gone, the family has almost completely died out, its mansion is crumbling, its fortune is dwindling. Will Mercy and Mordecai somehow manage to reverse the tide? There are hints here of Homer's Odyssey and, in the whale-obsessed father, of Melville's Moby-Dick. But, in larger part, the story seems to be a dark combination of fairy tale and fever dream, replete with reality-bending, dark secrets, and a fascinating, multigenerational family.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)