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Summary
Summary
Michael Parker's vast and involving novel about pirates and slaves, treason and treasures, madness and devotion, takes place on a tiny island battered by storms and cut off from the world. Inspired by two little-known moments in history, it begins in 1813, when Theodosia Burr, en route to New York by ship to meet her father, Aaron Burr, disappears off the coast of North Carolina. It ends a hundred and fifty years later, when the last three inhabitants of a remote island--two elderly white women and the black man who takes care of them--are forced to leave their beloved spot of land. Parker tells an enduring story about what we'll sacrifice for love, and what we won't.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Parker's affecting fifth novel mines two historical anecdotes from 1813 and 1970 to draw parallel narratives around island dwellers off the North Carolina coast. When a vessel carrying Theodosia, daughter of Vice President Aaron Burr, is attacked by pirates, she's left for dead on Nag's Head island. A parchment-thin hermit nurses her back to health and protects her as she embarks on a new life with a freed slave while still lamenting the loss of her possessions and her past. And in 1970, Woodrow, a black man, and Maggie and Whaley, two white sisters, are the last remaining residents of the same North Carolina island. Woodrow knows the myths that mainlanders have created around the trio's isolation: "They wanted to turn it into... something about how lost the three of them were across the water, all cut off from the rest of the world and turned peculiar because of it." Both sets of island people forge indelible allegiances to each other, linked as they are by blood and water. Parker's (Don't Make Me Stop Now) complex world is stocked with compelling characters brought to life by elegant prose. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The outer banks of North Carolina is the setting for two darkly linked tales spanning 150 years, both inspired by real-life events: the disappearance of disgraced former vice president Aaron Burr's daughter after her ship is battered by a storm off the Carolina coastand possibly taken over by piratesand the evacuation of a tiny island by its last three townspeople, including two elderly female descendents of Theodosia Burr Alston.Theo, as she is known, is on her way to New York in 1813 to visit her father, whom she is determined to clear of treason charges, when fate intervenes. In Parker's visionary, feverish telling, she washes up on a beach where a hermit called Old Whaley nurses her to health, builds her a shelter and ultimately becomes her partner. Many decades later, in the 1970s, her great-great-great-great grandchildren, Maggie and Whaley, are looked after by Woodrow Thornton, a black man who lost his wife to Hurricane Wilma. Out of his commitment to the women, and out of guilt for leaving his beloved Sarah on the island the day of the storm while he did business on the mainland, he has refused to abandon the hurricane zone like so many others. The mainland has long been cursed for Maggie, whose obsession with a younger man who abandoned her led her into madness when she pursued him. The long shadow of slavery adds haunting resonance to this powerful, lyrically penetrating novel, the title of which has as much to do with the liquidity of history, identity and storytelling as it does with oceans and storms. Parker invokes magic as well as mystery in exploring the ways the past not only haunts the present but in some ways anticipates it. Like Faulkner and O'Connor, Parker creates a place of beauty and complexity which, in the end, one is reluctant to leave.A vividly imagined historical tale of isolated lives. ]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Imaginative prose and rich characters seamlessly meld in two narratives separated only in time. In one, Theodosia, famously missing daughter of notorious vice-president Aaron Burr, is stranded on an island off the coast of North Carolina after a pirate attack in 1813. Taken in by an island dweller, she accepts her fate and soon relinquishes her past life on the mainland and learns to fall in love again, not just with her savior but also with the island. In the other, on the same remote island, the dynamic between two white sisters and a black man in the 1970s is explored as they come to terms with leaving the island for good. As the last living residents, related by blood and spirit to Theodosia and her community, they reconsider their relationship with one another and their bonds to the island and its past. Parker develops Theodosia's narrative less than the other, unfortunately for readers because it is in the former that the novel shines brightest. But all in all, there's much more here than meets the eye.--Bayer, Casey Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A novel ties the fate of Aaron Burr's daughter to a cloistered community on the Outer Banks. AMERICAN history brims with stories of mysterious disappearances. We still wonder what happened to Virginia Dare, the first English infant born in this country, in 1587, in the lost Roanoke settlement of what would become North Carolina. Also unknown is the fate of a woman who disappeared in the same region generations later: Theodosia Burr Alston, daughter of Aaron Burr and wife of the governor of South Carolina, whose ship sank off the coast in January 1813. Theodosia's story is just one of two enigmatic plot lines in Michael Parker's latest novel, "The Watery Part of the World." The other is inspired by the real lives of the three last inhabitants of a barrier island in the Outer Banks, an attempt to explain what led these elderly people to abandon their homes and move to the mainland in the early 1970s. In Parker's imaginative yet plausible reconstruction, Theodosia's ship is attacked by a pirate named Thaddeus Daniels, a character modeled on Blackbeard, who made his base on nearby Ocracoke Island. Although Daniels kills most of the passengers and crew, he becomes convinced that Theodosia is "touched by God," so he puts her ashore at Nags Head. There a hermit the local people call Old Whaley - "rail thin, skin the ghastly gray-white of a fish belly" - offers her shelter. Not content with mere survival, Theodosia dreams of restoring her father's tarnished reputation by stealing back the trunks of papers Daniels has seized from her ship. But as she searches his house, his watchdog attacks her. Whaley flees with her, half dead in the bottom of his boat, to fictional Yaupon Island, where they establish a makeshift household and, eventually, a family. The novel's contemporary sections concern two of Theodosia and Whaley's descendants: Theodosia (who calls herself Whaley) and Maggie, the last two white inhabitants of Yaupon Island. They're night-and-day different: Maggie "dressed so don't-give-a damn" in a "ratty skirt" and "stretch-necked T-shirt"; Whaley so prim and so perpetually shocked by the high cost of groceries in the city that she sits on the steps of the abandoned church, reading the price circulars aloud. The only other islander is Woodrow Thornton, a black man who was left a widower after his beloved wife, Sarah, died in a hurricane. Though the narration in Theodosia's chapters hews to her point of view, Parker ties other aspects of the contemporary plot to its central characters, providing "Rashomon"-like views of the novel's events. Sarah's death (in which Maggie and Whaley are complicit) and Maggie's affair with a much younger man (and her disastrous attempt to follow him to the mainland) are seen from multiple points of view, providing the reader with more, and more painful, information at each turn. Also complicating these sections are the "Tape Recorders," the name the islanders give the anthropologists who come to study them. "The moment they stepped off the boat," Woodrow notes, "Whaley'd switch into her high-tider talk, what the Tape Recorders loved to call an Old English brogue." Whaley, Maggie and Woodrow are, it seems, the last speakers of a dialect that will be lost when they die. Parker's prose, vivid with local color, is the strongest aspect of the novel. Maggie, out for a swim, "had her back to the shore, eyes out to sea, floating past the breakers in the mild after-supper surf. Pointing her feet to the horizon, sculling as the sun shot through her, touched her places with sudsy fingers." Elsewhere Woodrow "pulled on his waders and packed himself some bologna biscuits and a can of syrupy peaches like he liked and boiled up last night's coffee and poured it in his thermos and took his flashlight out to search the weeds in front of the house for the stub of a Sweet he might have thought he'd finished one day when he was cigar flush." Parker conveys their voices with a seeming effortlessness that belies the labor behind it. But in the end "The Watery Part of the World" disappoints by not thoroughly pursuing its rich subject matter. Parker amply explores the interpersonal possibilities of his intertwined stories, but although his characters occasionally think about the implications of race they don't do so in a sustained fashion. We are told, when it comes to the Tape Recorders, that Woodrow "wouldn't answer the questions like they wanted him to because seemed to Woodrow they had the answers already, that the questions were swole up with the answer, like a snake had swallowed a frog." Yet these flashes of rumination don't emerge as a satisfying critique of the way these anthropologists relate to their subjects. The lost infant Virginia Dare is perhaps emblematic of the novel's failings: she appears briefly as the subject of Maggie and Whaley's childhood game, "a version of hide-and-go-seek based in historical fact, island lore, myth and the endless fascination they had for stories featuring female adventurers." But by merely invoking her story in the context of the adult Maggie's love affair, Parker doesn't make it fully resonant. "The Watery Part of the World" is expert at conveying a sense of people and place, but it's regrettable that, in this otherwise fine piece of writing, Parker didn't imagine his way more deeply into the world he's created. Emily Barton's most recent novel is "Brookland." She teaches creative writing at Yale and Columbia. Michael Parker's tale is inspired by two mysterious disappearances in coastal North Carolina.
Library Journal Review
In his latest novel, award winner Parker (Towns Without Rivers) takes readers deep into two time periods in the same pocket universe of North Carolina's Outer Banks. Theodosia Burr Alston is traveling by ship to reunite with her father, disgraced Founder Aaron Burr. In this reimagining of the real woman's mysterious disappearance in 1813, Theodosia's ship is attacked by pirates. Her apparent insanity spares her life. Theodosia finds herself stranded on a dismal island with no one but an old hermit with whom to share her history. A parallel story set in 1970 focuses on her 20th-century descendants, the last two white women alive on the island, and Woodrow, the black man who feels compelled to care for the women despite their complicated history. VERDICT While not a rollicking adventure or page-turning mystery, this is a highly readable study of fear, compulsion, and what it means to be trapped. The writing is smoky and beautiful; the lonely island setting is the most compelling character in the story. Against this backdrop, Parker delves into the human heart and distills for his readers the truths found there. Recommended for fans of Southern gothic, nautical, and historical fiction.-Therese Oneill, Monmouth, OR (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.