Status
Publication
Description
"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers, a novel inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated towns in the Northeast. In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys' descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland. During the tumultuous summer of 1912, Matthew Diamond, a retired, idealistic but prejudiced schoolteacher-turned-missionary, disrupts the community's fragile balance through his efforts to educate its children. His presence attracts the attention of authorities on the mainland who, under the influence of the eugenics-thinking popular among progressives of the day, decide to forcibly evacuate the island, institutionalize its residents, and develop the island as a vacation destination. Beginning with a hurricane flood reminiscent of the story of Noah's Ark, the novel ends with yet another Ark. In prose of breathtaking beauty and power, Paul Harding brings to life an unforgettable cast of characters: Iris and Violet McDermott, sisters raising three orphaned Penobscot children; Theophilus and Candace Larks and their brood of vagabond children; the prophetic Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who lives in a hollow tree; and more. A spellbinding story of resistance and survival, This Other Eden is an enduring testament to the struggle to preserve human dignity in the face of intolerance and injustice"--… (more)
Media reviews
User reviews
from This Other Eden by Paul Harding
“Malaga Island was home to a mixed-race fishing community from the mid-1800s to 1912, when the state of Maine evicted 47 residents from their homes and exhumed and relocated their buried dead.
The novel opens with the riveting story of a terrible storm washing over a small island off the coast of Maine, with a family clinging to the branches of a large tree and watching houses and people caught in the angry waters in the flood below. The Eden that Benjamin Honey had built was destroyed in 1815. His wife Esther tells the tale to her grandchildren, the history of their Ark island.
The Honey family had lived there for six generations, since an African ex-slave Civil War veteran and his Irish wife settled there. Their neighbors included the Larks with their colorless children, and the McDermott sisters who took in three orphaned Native American children, and the spinster Annie Parker, and Civil War veteran Zachary Hand who preferred his hollow tree to his cabin. The mixed races of the families had produced individuals of every type, the pale and the dark, green eyes and red hair, straight hair and tightly curled.
It’s a harsh life but they have survived. Theirs is a tolerant society where brother and sister raise their children, and a man can don his mother’s dress to keep house while his wife cuts her hair and goes fishing on the ocean.
The state sent a pastor to open a school. The community is Christian, the Bible and Shakespeare among the few, tattered books in the community. The teacher discovered a girl who is a mathematical prodigy, a boy who masters Latin, and another who is a gifted, untrained artist.
The Eugenics movement was at its height. The islanders were disturbing. They were measured and assessed, labeled and judged to be degenerate by the “plain white” of the mainland. The mixing of races, the intermixing of blood, could not produce anything but imbeciles, morons, and degenerates.
The entire population of Apple Island was relocated, many to institutions.
The early book takes us into these people’s lives and personalities. Yes, there are relationships that we judge to be perverse. There are people whose sanity we may doubt. A girl who only eats wild things she finds, starfish and snakes. One woman was abused by her father, and intended to murder the resultant child. She was prevented, and her child and his children became the center of her old age. Zachary Hand carves images in his hollow tree where he finds peace. But we have sympathy for these people. They are removed from the world and a society that could not have accepted them, eking out a subsistence life, doing the best they could with what they had.
The teacher determines to ‘save’ one child of the island, a fifteen-year-old boy with straight hair and and greenish eyes. He writes an acquaintance, hoping he would take the boy in until he could enter art school. It seemed a mercy to separate Ethan Honey from his family’s fate, to allow him access to white society.
For all his good intentions, the teacher creates a series of disastrous events. Years in the future, historians will explore the buried history of the deserted island, and write about the paintings and drawings of the mysterious Ethan Honey.
Beautifully written, with stunning descriptive passages and a mounting urgency, this is a novel of history and a vision of what society could have become, a condemnation and a warning.
I received a free galley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
But, the island draws the attention of the government and they decide it's time to civilize this island. It doesn't take much imagination to guess what will happen to the residents.
I liked this. It has a memorable cast of characters. I also liked how it flipped my view of the island. Really, at the beginning I was not impressed with how these people were living. They were in poor health, practically starving, one living in a tree! But by the end, I was convinced they had it right, and the life they'd built there was one they should be allowed to continue.
Recommended.
I couldn't help thinking about the indigenous people who were deemed better off living as the Caucasian invaders took their land and relocated many. It is a sad fact that our history demonstrates this bigotry and prejudice. I love the history of the people of Apple Island, who neither harmed nor judged each other. Paul Harding's writing is exquisite.
The story eventually focuses on one teenage boy with a skill for drawing. When the plans are being discussed to clear the island, the teacher manages to find a place for Ethan Honey on the mainland, where he can prepare to enter art school. His experiences away from home include meeting an Irish housemaid.
The characters in this book are certainly colorful and Harding juxtaposes the good and bad parts of this community. His narrative covers a relatively short span of time and is told in a straightforward style, and the writing is lovely. I liked this quiet novel, but it's inclusion on the Booker shortlist puzzles me.
In the early 1900's, a young man determined to bring education to the island disrupts this harmony. Matthew Diamond has a certain respect for these people in spite of being very prejudiced to the black individuals. His efforts come to the attention of the authorities in Maine who decide it is time to rid the island of these people and break up their way of life.
The book is sad, funny in places, but always beautifully written and each character is portrayed with respect. This is based on a real island off the coast of Maine that was cleared out of all the people. There has been some controversy among the descendants of these people regarding the telling of the story. Still a good read. Won the Pulitizer Prize.
The book requires concentration and focus despite being brief (just over 200 pages), yet it covers multiple characters and time periods. There are references to eugenics that was a popular movement during the beginning of the twentieth century which were definitely upsetting, yet they were necessary to the story and to present the real temper of the times. The effect on the primary characters in these passages was devastating, but the narrative voice handled the main characters with kindness and respect. I was drawn into its setting and era and discovered that I was moved by an emotional connection to the people living on Apple Island.
While I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to discerning readers, especially those interested in the social history of the period, mainly because it has such a deep concept, exquisite details, and lovely prose.
Harding depicts the islanders as flawed, but basically innocent and loving. Despite hunger and extreme poverty, they evince close ties to family, nature, art, education, and especially their home. Esther spends her time rocking and observing events while remembering an intensely troubling relationship with her dead White father. Her son, Eha, functions as an island handyman while also caring for his mother and his three children. His son, Ethan, is a central figure in the narrative for two main reasons: he is a gifted artist and can pass as a White. The Larks are a strange lot¬. Theophilus and Candace are siblings but live as husband and wife in a role reversal. Their four children are almost feral, roaming the island at night. Iris and Violet McDermott take in washing as well as two abandoned native-American children. Zachary Hand of God Proverb is especially “queer.” He is a Union Army veteran who spends his time in a hollow tree carving scenes from the bible. Not to be outdone by the humans, three highly distinctive dogs fill out the cast of characters.
Their strangeness notwithstanding, the islanders are oblivious to how they are viewed by the outside. The mainlanders see them as degenerate and queer. Rumors of incest and infanticide persist. Their racial makeup is indeed eclectic and thus troubling to a state living in the thrall of eugenics. Harding refers to the community as a “distillate of Angolan fathers and Scottish grandpas, Irish mothers and Congolese grannies, Cape Verdean uncles and Penobscot aunts, cousins from Dingle, Glasgow, and Montserrat.”
Matthew Diamond, a White missionary, and volunteer schoolteacher, sponsors a visit to the island by a governmental committee and thus unwittingly initiates the ultimate decision to remove the community and burn down its buildings. Diamond is a conflicted character. His self-image is as of a caring person yet he holds deep-seated racist feelings, especially toward Black people. Remarkably, he notices that several of the children are gifted, nonetheless the only one he moves to save from displacement is Ethan, who can easily pass as White.
Harding deftly uses biblical imagery to bolster the view that the islanders were treated unjustly. Their founding story congers the flood. The use of apples as a key image for the island recalls the Eden myth. The expulsion of the islanders by heartless governmental bureaucrats brings to mind the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden by a vengeful God. Esther and Zachary as biblical prophets and Ethan as a Christ figure in the wilderness are more subtle but also powerful biblical iconography. Moreover, Harding achieves a mythic mood by using long, complex, and lyrical sentences that stand in contrast to the underlying racism and brutality on display elsewhere in the novel.
For such a short
I'm a fan of family sagas, and this is a rich one that dives deep without becoming a tome. It's the right length for the story it wants to tell, and Harding proves that you don't need in excess of three hundred pages to write something that makes the reader feel like they really know the family and its journey.
I'm very glad I read this book - it excels at what it is trying to accomplish, and does so in a way that is moving and heartbreaking. If you too enjoy family sagas, I recommend this one for a cold winter day.
Thank you to NetGalley and W. W. Norton for providing a copy for review.
I am having a hard time writing this review, because I wish everyone could have the experience of being drawn into this world without preconceptions. It is historical fiction, a modern retelling of Noah, an exposé of a terrible incident in Maine history, and a wonderfully-written story about a family and the price they pay for their differences. I loved the characters and the writing, and I have since gone on to learn more about the real Malaga Island and what happened there. Highly recommended.
Of the islanders I was most invested in Esther, one of the oldest living residents of the island, and her grandson, Ethan. Esther has a complicated and violent history, she loves Shakespeare and is intelligent and wise. She’s seen so much, too much, of life and the people who inhabit it, and she has a steadfast spirit that makes her feel powerful, no matter what befalls the islanders. Ethan is fascinating, as well. He’s a painter and the scenes that described his painting or the way he viewed people, plants and animals, was lovely. He is sent away, off the island, to the mainland as what is described as an opportunity… but is that possible?
The people on the island descended from a Black man and an Irish woman. And the community has suffered inbreeding and poverty. All of the people look different. Some look “nearly white” while others seem “drained of color”, others are in a spectrum of brown skin tones. Outsiders are repulsed by what they see as less-than human. Even the school teacher is rattled by his own revulsion. And yet he finds them to be intelligent, interesting, eager, loving, kind, hard working. But seeing their value is not enough to eradicate his fear and bias. So often the perceptions of these “saviors” (as they think of themselves) is rooted not necessarily in hatred, but rather a very real fear. And this fear is more dangerous than anything.
I was lucky enough to read this arc physically, but to ALSO experience the audiobook, via NetGalley and RB Media (Recorded Books). It is narrated by Eduardo Ballerini, a talented actor, who lends that talent to this storytelling in a way that was, quite frankly, perfect. He really takes the storytelling up a notch and has a subtlety that comes across, beautifully. I loved listening to him.
This book is sad, to put it simply. But it’s also tender and has a grounded warmth. Knowing these characters meant something to me, and I think so many people will feel the same. I’m so grateful to have read this wonderful novel, and discovered Paul Harding’s immense, empathetic talent.
+ Thank you to NetGalley and RB Media for the audiobook arc of this novel.
Diamond discovers that while some of the children (as might be expected) are mentally deficient, others are quite talented, including a Native American girl who soon surpasses his own math skills and Ethan Honey, a young boy with unusual artistic talent. Diamond is conflicted in his attitude towards the Apple Islanders: he is ashamed of his repulsion for the Black adults but believes that education can better the lives of the children--especially those who, like Ethan, could pass for white. When the mainlanders send scientists and doctors to measure heads, record physical features and assess mental capabilities as a prelude to removing the inhabitants and clearing the way for their plans, Diamond decides to "save" Ethan by getting a friend in Massachusetts to foster his talents, giving him a place to stay over the summer and a seat at an art school in the fall term.
As you can expect, all did not go well for the Apple Islanders, nor even for Ethan. The most positive notes are the community's love of their island, their acceptance of one another, and the way they all have each others' backs. Harding's descriptions of the natural world are quite beautiful, and he gives us a roster of unforgettable characters. Overall, a lovely, sad, but achingly hopeful book.
In 1792, a formerly enslaved black man, and his caucasian wife, Patience Rafferty, arrive on " Apple Island". Over the years, they have descendants, and other people arrive. It is a mixed race
A missionary, Matthew Diamond, arrives to assist the Islanders with the education of the children. P. 93 " he is sickened by his incurable aversion to help these people he truly believes he is ordained to help."
Soon after, a committee from the Governor's Council arrive to inspect the settlement and the residents of the Island. Afterwards, an announcement appears in the Foxden Newspaper . " Homeless Apple Island Residents made wards of the State: Queer Squatters deemed degenerate, in need of assistance. "
A dark and disturbing read.