![]() The novel is a collage of voices and narrative perspectives that skips back and forth in time over the course of two decades, filling in details piece by piece, leapfrogging the book’s pivotal incident while teasingly hinting at it, so that only late in the book do we discover what actually happened in the orchard, and why Robert Goodenough, James and Sadie’s youngest son, has spent his adult life running westwards. The pressures of poverty, illness and the grind of working land that was never meant to be farmed are intensified by the simmering hostility between James and Sadie Goodenough, a couple whose manifest unsuitability is played out in the divisions of their orchard between “spitters” (for making cider and applejack) and “eaters”, and in the loyalties they command among their children. Ohio’s Black Swamp is inhospitable to humans, animals, crops and trees alike, and at the opening of the novel in 1838, the Goodenough family have been battling for nine years to grow the requisite 50 trees that will secure their claim to their land. ![]() ![]() But the pastoral air conjured by the title is misleading. ![]()
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