A Reckoning

January 29, 2018
Spalding’s excellent fifth novel, after The Purchase, is a drama set in the late 1850s as conflicts over slavery and abolition tear apart a Virginia plantation family. The Dickinson farm is run by two half-brothers: Benjamin, a brutal slave owner, and John, a circuit-riding preacher who manages the farm, which is a financial failure. A stranger arrives claiming to be a bird-watching naturalist, but he is really an ardent Yankee abolitionist intent on convincing the Dickinson slaves to run away to freedom in Canada. Slaves escape, the bank takes the farm, and the family begins an arduous and painful wagon train journey to a hopeful new life in Kansas or Nebraska. John abandons his family to search for the sold enslaved girl he loves, further fracturing any relationship with his wife and children. The family’s trek west is fraught with peril, hardship, disappointment, and injury, while slave catchers pursue runaways north and abolitionists and pro-slavery border ruffians fight in Kansas and Missouri. Spalding’s novel is a grim tale of pre–Civil War tensions, economic despair, and family disintegration, rife with historical detail.

February 1, 2018
A Virginia family suffers poverty and sorrow as slavery tears their world apart.Taking up the lives of the Dickinson family from her last historical novel, Spalding (The Purchase, 2013, etc.) follows the misfortunes of patriarch Daniel's sons: Benjamin, a dissolute spendthrift; and his half brother, John, born to Daniel's second wife, "a small, sure-footed orphan" he married out of pity. Benjamin, who inherited Daniel's money, cotton fields, and slaves, has plunged the family into debt; John, a Methodist preacher barely eking out a living for his wife and four children, tries valiantly to save both families from penury. "We must be thankful for adversity," John preaches as he travels through the remote countryside. His life stands as a grim example. Despite his religious faith, though, John is an angry man whose own sons, headstrong Patton and quieter, introspective Martin, become victims of his rage. He bans the adolescent Patton from the house, sending him alone into the wilderness to secure land in the Kansas Territory; and when the family's fortunes plummet, he sends his wife, daughters, and Martin to make the perilous trek west, without him. The pivotal event of the novel is the arrival of a stranger: he says he is studying birds, but in fact, he is an abolitionist come to persuade the family's slaves to abscond to Canada. He has brought "a compass and a knife and a map" for each of them, and despite much fear, the next day many slaves have left, including Bry, whose futile escape attempt as a child had dire consequences: he was castrated. Now in his 50s, he yearns to go to Canada to find his mother. Spalding portrays in bleak, gritty detail the hardships of daily life in the 1850s. Tenderness is rare and cherished: John's toward the slave Emly, whom Benjamin heartlessly sells; Martin's toward a bear cub he rescues when Patton shoots the mother; and Bry's toward a Native American woman who protects him. As the characters struggle to survive, they discover that redemption is elusive and forgiveness, hard-won.An engrossing, deftly crafted narrative.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 15, 2018
Spalding's timely, historically sensitive sequel to The Purchase (2013), a literary saga which also confidently stands alone, explores the ramifications of slavery on the next generation of the Dickinson family. An abolitionist's arrival on their southwestern Virginia farm in 1855 sparks the dissolution of their longtime way of life. Some enslaved men escape. Without their labor, the crops fail and money grows tight, fomenting conflict between circuit-riding preacher John and his cruel half-brother, Benjamin, who owns their land and slaves. The narrative then turns adventurous as it follows several people, including John's wife, Lavina, 13-year-old son, Martin, and an escaped slave, Bry, as their journeys away from Jonesville unite and diverge. The characters are full-fledged individuals whose mind-sets reflect their time and place. John is enamored of their African American housekeeper and imagines she loves him in return, while Lavina is an intriguing mix of independence and feminine conformity. For John's family, it's also noteworthy that the unspoiled American landscape, spectacularly described in its glory and dangers, offers a spirituality and freedom absent from his controlling form of religion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)