Summary
In this superb new novel from the acclaimed, bestselling author of Ellen Foster, Sights Unseen, and Charms for the Easy Life, an extraordinary woman recalls a nation's bloodiest epoch and a magnificent life forged in its fires.
Author Notes
Kaye Gibbons was born on May 5, 1960 in Nash County, North Carolina. She received a bachelor's degree in American literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first novel, Ellen Foster, was published in 1987. It won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was chosen as one of Oprah's Book Club Selections, and was adapted into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie. Her other novels include The Virtuous Woman, A Cure for Dreams, Sights Unseen, On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, Divining Women, The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster, The Lunatics' Ball, and The Secret Devotions of Mary Magdalen. Her novel Charms for the Easy Life was also adapted into a made-for-television movie. She also received the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, which recognized her contribution to French Literature in 1996 and she received the North Carolina Award for Literature in 1998.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A plea for racial tolerance is the subtext of Gibbons's estimable new novel, her first foray into historical fiction. Like her previous books (Ellen Foster, 1997, etc.), it is set in the South, but this one takes place during the Civil War era. Now 70 and near death, Emma Garnet Tate begins her account by recalling her youth as a bookish, observant 12-year-old in 1842, living on a Virginia plantation in a highly dysfunctional family dominated by her foulmouthed father, a veritable monster of parental tyranny and racial prejudice. Samuel Tate abuses his wife and six children but he also studies the classics and buys paintings by old masters. Emma's long-suffering mother, of genteel background and gentle ways, is angelic and forgiving; her five siblings' lives are ruined by her father's cruelty; and all are discreetly cared for by Clarice, the clever, formidable black woman who is the only person Samuel Tate respects. (Clarice knows Samuel's humble origins and the dark secret that haunts him, which readers learn only at the end of the book.) Gibbons authentically reproduces the vocabulary and customs of the time: Emma's father says "nigger" while more refined people say Negroes. "Nobody said the word slave. It was servant," Emma observes. At 17, Emma marries one of the Boston Lowells, a surgeon, and spends the war years laboring beside him in a Raleigh hospital. Through graphic scenes of the maimed and dying, Gibbons conveys the horror and futility of battle, expressing her heroine's abolitionist sympathies as Emma tends mangled bodies and damaged souls. By the middle of the book, however, Emma's narration and the portrayal of Clarice as a wise and forbearing earthmother lack emotional resonance. Emma, in fact, is far more interesting as a rebellious child than as a stoic grown woman. One finishes the novel admiring Emma and Clarice but missing the compelling narrative voice that might have made their story truly moving. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Gibbons, author most recently of Sights Unseen (1995), has evolved a distinctive narrative style based on the poignant eloquence and acuity of young female narrators struggling to transcend the moral and spiritual failings of their troubled families. Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, her newest creation, fits the mold but with a subtle twist; she's telling her tale at the end of her long and tumultuous life, a life derailed, as so many were, by the Civil War. Like Jane Smiley in her latest novel, Gibbons has gone back to that still-smoldering conflict and imagined it from a wholly personal and feminine perspective, concerned not with politics but with blood and suffering. Two opposing characters embody her dismay over ignorance, brutality, racism, selfishness, and hate versus her belief in virtue, compassion, generosity, knowledge, and love: Emma Garnet's father, an evil, slave-owning tyrant; and Clarice, his black housekeeper, who, in spite of being at the lowest echelon of southern society, is the true leader of their Virginia estate. It is Clarice who teaches Emma Garnet how to be a decent human being, lessons that lead to her controversial but loving marriage to a distinguished and altruistic Northerner, Dr. Quincy Lowell. The Lowells would have lived an easy life had there been no war, but they are drawn inexorably into the horror. Quincy and Clarice literally work themselves to death caring for the wounded, while Emma Garnet, who becomes as adept at surgery as Quincy, survives to mourn the dead. Gibbons is unsparing in her depiction of the gruesome reality of the carnage, and unflinching in her effort to convey the madness of that time and the havoc it wreaked on people's souls. --Donna Seaman
School Library Journal Review
YA-In 1900, Emma Garnet Tate Lowell tells her life story, beginning when she was 12 in antebellum Virginia. Her father, who used brutality and fear to intimidate family, slaves, and servants, killed a slave in a fit of anger. The plantation household was managed by Clarice, a free black woman of courage and loyalty. Emma Garnet's younger sister Maureen was both dutiful and eager to learn the graces that attracted a suitable husband. Independent of spirit, disdainful of housewifely skills, intelligent and opinionated, Emma Garnet determined to escape from Seven Oaks. Details of her reminiscences are sketchy at times, but she met and married Quincy Lowell of the Boston Lowells, a surgeon and everything her father was not. Her mother unselfishly urged her daughter to take Clarice with her to help them get settled in Raleigh, where Quincy planned to set up his medical practice. Clarice never returned, but devoted herself to the Lowells and their three daughters. Emma Garnet tells her story with unflinching honesty, revealing a complex character who changed from a self-absorbed and indulged child to a loving wife and mother. She eventually opened her home to wounded Confederate soldiers and found new purpose and meaning in her life by helping others. YAs will find Emma Garnet, Maureen, Clarice, and Quincy to be fascinating and endearing characters whose flaws as well as strengths are revealed as the story unfolds. The author's picture of life in the Civil War South is vivid and unsentimental, and her characters are drawn with clarity and sympathy.-Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Gibbons's first outing after anointment by Oprah is a Civil War tale that's historically researched to a fault but psychologically the stuff of melodrama. On what may be the last day of her life, Emma Garnet Lowell, neé Tate, sets out to tell all, from childhood in tidewater Virginia (where she was born in 1830) through marriage, childbirth, the war itself, widowhood, and old age. Everything about the telling in setting and in people is writ large. Of characters who are bad, central and most horrendous by far is Emma's father, Samuel Tate, a crude, tyrannical, pro-slavery plantation owner who's raised himself from nothing, kills one of his own slaves, collects Titians, and prizes his Latin studies. Least bad is Emma's mother Alice, saint and central martyr to this ruffian and gout-plagued husband and father who curses Emma's unborn children when she marries Dr. Quincy Lowell of the Boston Lowells, and moves to Raleigh, North Carolina, taking with her the faithful, kind, stalwart, true household servant Clarice Washington. In Raleigh will be born the couple's three perfect daughters, and there the war will rage, taking an always-greater toll as the years grind on, supplies grow meager, and both Quincy and Emma work beyond endurance in the horrors of the military hospital. History throughout is summoned up in the tiniest of details``her frock, deep green velvet with red grosgrain running like Christmas garlands around her skirt''and though Emma's voice is intended to be of its period, it unfortunately tends also toward the wearying (``Without my brother, I would not have known to use books as a haven, a place to go when pain has invaded my citadel''). A book of saints, sinners, and sorrows offering much pleasure for history-snoopers (hospital scenes among the best) but finding no new ground for the saga of the South.
Library Journal Review
In 1990, aged Emma Garnet Tate Lowell recalls her hard life in Gibbons's (Ellen Foster, Audio Reviews, LJ 11/1/96) new novel, read ably by Polly Holliday. Raised on a plantation, Emma nonetheless opposes slavery, based largely on her contempt for her monstrous father. Escaping him via marriage, she finds peace with husband Quincy, three daughters, and faithful servant Clarice. The Civil War shatters her idyll, as she works alongside Quincy nursing Confederate casualties. An unabashed tearjerker, this novel presents no fewer than four deathbed scenes, with three major characters dying off camera. Most of them seem to emerge from central casting, with only Emma Garnet herself providing much depth. Her blindness to the privileges of her own life grates on the listener, until the body count mounts and one must acknowledge she has earned her self-pity. Buy this for Gibbons's rich prose and period detail, Holliday's cadenced reading, and the Oprah factor.John Hiett, Iowa City P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
