Starred review from September 1, 2012
The dark, silent, forbidding Ohio River flows like a line of moral demarcation in Hunt's (The Exquisite, 2006, etc.) latest literary foray. Hunt's story arises from the rough edges of mid-19th-century civilization, before and after the great Civil War. It follows a young girl, Ginny, in a tragic odyssey from Indiana to Kentucky and home again. Full of pride and promises--"struck it rich as a king in trade and now was going to let the land care for him"--widower Linus Lancaster journeyed north to Indiana to marry a cousin he had long fancied. He assumed her widowed, with rumors of her husband dead in a far-off war. But the husband was only wounded, left with a wooden foot and a cane. The cousin had a daughter, Ginny, and as young girls do, Ginny flirted, and Linus' attentions turned her way. There is a marriage, and the couple treks into Kentucky, where the boastful talk and sweet promises end, not with a fine home, all columns, gables and a 50-foot porch, but instead, at a rough cabin with extra rooms tacked on, a place where Ginny, only 14, must care for Linus' daughters, 10 and 12. Opening with a prologue in the form of an extraordinarily beautiful meditation on loss, Hunt's writing deepens into allegory, symbolism and metaphor, all while spinning forth a dark tale of abuse, incest and corruption reminiscent of Faulkner, a circuitous tale in which pigs continually darken the narrative, right to the point where the brutal Linus is killed with a "pig sticker," and Ginny becomes captive within a shadowy, ambiguous gothic-tinged maelstrom of revenge. Blood, race and slavery thread through the story, until Ginny returns across the river again to Indiana where she lives out her life as Scary Sue, working as a housekeeper for another widower, turning away more than once from love and reconciliation in pursuit of a redemption only she understands and desires. Profoundly imaginative, strikingly original, deeply moving.
COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
September 3, 2012
Hunt tells an unforgettable tale of the savagery of antebellum America in his haunting newest (after The Impossibly). Married off at a young age to her mother's second cousin, the teenaged Ginny quickly discovers that her new husband's Kentucky pig farm isn't the bucolic idyll she'd been promised. Linus quickly devolves from promising spouse to abusive master of his wife as well as two of his slaves, Cleome and Zinnia, whom the lonely Ginny befriends. But Linus isn't content to man the slaughter alone: "He said if we were all going to eat pig⦠then we ought to kill it⦠The years went by and we ate and ate and so we killed and killed." Eventually, Linus's reign of violence impels Ginny to starting raising her own hand against Cleome and Zinnia. But when Linus suddenly dies, the slave girls turn the tables on their brutal mistress and keep her shackled in a shed next to Linus's decaying body. Though the chronologically disjointed story is relayed through the points of view of several characters, Hunt deftly maintains an unsettling tone and a compelling narrative that will linger with readers long after the last page.
September 1, 2012
Glinting at times with the simple, ominous beauty of a murder ballad, at other times this novel wallows in trauma and threatens to sink. It is told in four parts, and all but one achieve a quick, fierce poignancy; the second, longest part becomes unwieldy and unbalances the whole. This part is told by Ginny, a young bride in antebellum Kentucky. Married at 14, she moves to her husband's pig farm and descends into a nightmare of violence, slavery, incest, and pedophilia. She is abused; she becomes complicit in the abuse of others; she becomes the abused again. The novel's initial affecting naivete and simplicity shifts, during her winding testimony, toward an indulgent, Faulknerian delirium that bloats and obscures excessively. One wishes the other partsa brief, beautifully told tragedy seemingly unconnected to the body of the novel, and later the perspectives of one of the former slave girls Ginny abused and was abused by, and of that woman's nephew after her deathmight have been given some of the space that was granted in excess to Ginny.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)