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Loading... The Purchase (edition 2013)by Linda Spalding
Work InformationThe Purchase by Linda Spalding
   No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) chailatte | Feb 5, 2024 |  Daniel Dickinson brought his young family and new wife (who was also very young) from Pennsylvania to Virginia. He was brought up in the Quaker faith and was a staunch abolitionist so only the most extreme circumstances would take him to a state that allowed slavery. Those circumstances were that his wife died soon after giving birth and he was thrown out of the Quaker fellowship because he kept the young orphan Ruth in his house after his wife died. Daniel decided to marry Ruth but that only compounded the problem because she was a Methodist. With no background of farming Daniel decided to become a farmer in Virginia. He went off to an auction to purchase some machinery but ended up buying a young slave by the name of Onesimus. Daniel never could explain how he made the bid and he didn’t even have enough money so he had to leave one of his horses with the auctioneer. When Onesimus broke his leg hauling logs for the house to be built for the family the local black healer Bett said he had to stay where he was until the leg healed. Onesimus convinced Daniel to buy some piglets to raise in the bottomland where he was confined because in his previous job he had looked after pigs and it was his one skill. The future life of the Dickinsons and Onesimus and Bett and the other neighbours and even children unborn was forever changed because of Daniel’s purchase of Onesimus. This was a powerful tale powerfully told. (  ) gypsysmom | Jun 15, 2020 | ) FBGNewbies | Jun 20, 2018 | (  )1  TheBookJunky | Apr 22, 2016 | The year is 1798. Daniel Dickenson, the father of five children is a Quaker living in Pennsylvania. His wife has just died a few months after giving birth to his youngest son. He has taken on a young woman, Ruth Boyd, an orphan and a Methodist, on a bond of indenture to help with the family during this time. Rather than return her to the almshouse as the Elders insist he feels obligated to keep her. This results in him being banished. He packs up his family along with Ruth Boyd whom he marries and undertakes a journey to Virginia to start a new life. The story that unfolds in The Purchase by Linda Spalding is an authentic depiction of what life was like as a pioneer in early America and embraces religion, family, morality and slavery. It is a story of hypocrisy as well as humanity. The title, The Purchase, refers to the protagonist’s inadvertent purchase of a young boy as a slave. Dickenson, being a Quaker, is an abolitionist, and struggles with this moral dilemma throughout the story. He acts like a slave owner, albeit an enlightened one and he benefits from slave labour, yet considers himself against slavery. This ambivalence is endemic in his character and impacts on his relationships with his family and his community. Spalding has a population of characters and yet this reader was able to discern each one and while their motivations were complex they all were believable. This book is seamlessly plotted and powerfully written with sparse yet elegant prose and though it works on many levels they’re all expertly woven together in an intricate mosaic. Though a remarkable accomplishment it fell short of five stars for me because I couldn’t relate to any of the characters. The time, the society, the circumstances were just too unfamiliar. (  ) RodRaglin | Jul 29, 2015 |
 The Purchase, an eerily compelling novel by Linda Spalding, has been nominated for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction....Spalding’s omniscient narrator ferries us through time, accruing characters, sidling us in and out of their perspectives. Her descriptive passages are simple lists of images and elements that create their own mesmerizing lyricism. Her metaphors can be awkward: It is one thing to compare the way the slaves are treated to the way animals are treated; it is another to compare slaves to animals. She deepens meaning with literary allusions to Virgil and the Bible; this works well, but leads, I think, to a melodramatic climax involving a thwarted interracial love. The most famous slave literature, on the other hand, tends to dramatize the way slavery hinders black people from loving themselves. Still, the novel is memorable. It reads like a disturbing dream imbued with the power of myth.  This school of novel writing also renders great dollops of moody landscapes, and Spalding is not lacking in that respect, either. But The Purchase is more successful than most at carrying off this kind of writing, partly because of Spalding’s ability to blend narrative drive with genuinely evocative scene setting and partly because her historical material — a dark wilderness in a dark era — lends itself to Faulknerian exaggeration...The only indisputable good to come out of the adventures of the Dickinson family is that Daniel eventually learns to forgive. It is not a triumph blazoned in glory; it is a small gesture, but it is real. Otherwise readers are free to come to their conclusions. In so doing, they will find themselves immersed in a powerful mood, a feeling of something dark and brooding and yet bracing, in one of the finest historical novels in recent years. The novel is shot through with religion – much of it focused on the struggle between Quaker humanism and the moral wilderness of the American South at the turn of the 19th century – and Spalding’s biblically rich prose is in heartbreaking harmony with her theme of freedom. What could it possibly mean to be free, the novel asks, if one’s life is so ferociously overdetermined, whether by God or the prevailing social order? Spalding offers a powerful perspective on pains and oppressions that are specific to a time and place, though it reverberates into the present in uncomfortable ways. The immediacy and sense of recognition percolating through The Purchase makes this reader wonder just how long a shadow history casts on the present day.
Shunned by his Quaker community for marrying a servant girl, Daniel Dickinson pursues a new life on the Virginia frontier, where his family's values are tested by the challenges of homestead life and the moral dilemma of slave ownership. No library descriptions found. 
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.54)
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