The Purchase

June 10, 2013
This novel of frontier life focuses on one family’s attempt to meet the challenges of antebellum America. At the beginning of the 19th century, widower Daniel Dickinson, cast out of his Quaker community, travels from Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley to the frontier of southern Virginia, taking with him the orphan Ruth Boyd as his new wife, and his five children—from Mary, the headstrong eldest, to the babe Joseph. When Daniel, a staunch abolitionist, inexplicably bids on the 13-year-old slave Onesimus, the purchase has many unfortunate effects. It also introduces freedom, consequence, and the hand of providence as themes Spading will follow with varying success. Onesimus befriends Mary and another slave, Bett, who is terrorized by her own master’s nightly visits. When Bett gets pregnant, the lives of Mary, Bett, Bett’s son, and her master, Jester Fox, become linked by both love and tragedy. Throughout the 15-year span of the novel, the Dickinson family is transformed by their disparate ambitions, though Spalding (Daughters of Captain Cook) struggles to fully develop characters in a book with a large cast. References to Virgil and the Old Testament imbue Spalding’s raw, powerful writing with some hope that “every human success simply requires faith,” but the bleak story lacks enough space to process the endless supply of tragedy. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group.

June 15, 2013
A displaced Pennsylvanian acquires a slave, with disastrous consequences, in Spalding's (Who Named the Knife, 2007, etc.) brooding latest. Daniel Dickinson has been cast out of his rigid community because he retained an unmarried servant girl after his wife's death in childbirth; it's typical of Daniel's right-minded but shortsighted thinking that he feels he can't return orphaned Ruth Boyd to the almshouse. Instead, he marries her and takes Ruth and his five children to Virginia--an odd choice for an anti-slavery Quaker in the winter of 1798. Attending an auction to buy equipment for his new farm, Daniel feels "his right arm go up as if pulled by a string" to bid on an enslaved boy; he is forced to honor a pledge he can't afford by hostile Virginians who dislike this outsider. Repaying the balance on his debt for Simus keeps Daniel's family in straitened circumstances for years. It already simmers with tension: 13-year-old Mary despises her Methodist stepmother, only two years older than she, and Ruth is bewildered by her aloof husband. Matters only get worse after Simus becomes intimate with Bett, "house girl" to the neighboring Fox family. When Bett becomes pregnant--probably by her master, who accuses Simus--the result is a lynching and a baby boy who will provoke deadly conflict between the two clans in the future. Spalding captures the grim particulars of slave life with unflinching yet restrained detail, and she gives each of her flinty characters sharply defined personalities and motivations as the story unfolds over several decades. Betrayal of principles and loved ones is a constant theme, yet there is also redemption: Uneducated, unassertive Ruth finally offers a vision of compassionate religion that stuns her dismissive husband, and Mary's battered friendship with Bett survives exploitation and flight to end with a moving reunion. Too slow-paced and dark for the casual reader, but a serious, probing look at the interaction of character and environment during a seminal period in American history.

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July 1, 2013
In 1798, Daniel Dickinson brings his five children and new bride out of Pennsylvania and into southwestern Virginia. A recent widower, Daniel has been cast out of the Quakers for marrying his family's Methodist servant, Ruth, a 15-year-old orphan. The work is unrelenting and arduous; they have no experience building a homestead or farming. When Daniel unintentionally purchases a slave boy, Onesimus, his abolitionist beliefs slowly evaporate in the face of economic necessity and the need to protect him, or so he rationalizes. With mesmerizing prose echoing the bleak environment, Spalding demonstrates how one snip of a people's moral fabric can cause their values to unravel. The many biblical allusions enhance the telling. The institution is as old as time, Daniel sorrowfully informs his daughter, Mary, when she questions him about slavery. Observing his example and its tragic aftereffects, Mary and her siblings grow up to form their own sense of right and wrong. A harrowing and moving saga with stunning evocations of day-to-day life, herbal medicine, and the meaning of freedom in early America.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2013

In this novel, winner of Canada's Governor General's Literary Award and set in early 1800s America (American-born, Toronto-based Spalding draws on family history), recently widowed Daniel Dickinson is shunned by his fellow Quakers after marrying his servant girl and must move the family from Pennsylvania to the Virginia frontier. There he offends his beliefs by purchasing a young black slave.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2013

In 1799, Daniel Dickinson leaves Pennsylvania, bound for Virginia. He has been turned out by his Quaker brethren for allowing Ruth Boyd, age 15, to stay on in his household to look after his children after his wife's death. Though Ruth becomes Daniel's wife, she is little accepted by his children. When Daniel attends an auction hoping to buy much needed homesteading tools, he instead comes home with a slave boy. He intends to grant the boy his freedom since Quakers do not believe in slavery. But a die has been cast, and soon he is harboring another slave, Bett, a pregnant healer who teaches one of Daniel's daughters the healing arts. As the fates of the slaves and Daniel's family become intertwined, death and betrayal are close behind. Try as he might, Daniel feels he has failed his family. VERDICT As readers follow a gritty cast of characters facing prejudice at every turn, they will question the cost of survival. Winner of the Canada Council for the Arts 2012 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction, this tragic historical novel of the American Southern frontier will appeal to readers who appreciated Edward P. Jones's The Known World or Toni Morrison's Beloved. [See Prepub Alert, 3/1/13.]--Keddy Ann Outlaw, Houston

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.