Linda Spalding

In this collection of short pieces published in 2000, most only three pages long, 74 authors write about books that have made a lasting impression on them, but which they have lost or that are otherwise hard to find. The works cited are quite eclectic, including major works of fiction, children's books, travelogues and other varieties of non-fiction. While most of the books--and the authors writing about them--were unfamiliar to me, this book is 100% fascinating from beginning to end. It is show more difficult to put down once you start, assuming, of course, that you are a book lover. Time after time, it demonstrates the power and importance of books, and it shows all the ways, large and small, that they educate and influence the lives we lead.

There is no need to single out individual examples of these authors' reminiscences, since all are interesting and many are memorably written. You'll be looking up these "lost classics" and their authors on the internet in almost every case. I'm happy to report that most of these books are no longer "lost". Some are available in reprints or new editions, and nearly all are available used at reasonable prices from Amazon, abebooks.com, and other sources.

This book will make you think about your own lost classics, and maybe you'll dig one or two up from the back of your double-stacked shelves or the bottom of a box in the back corner of your storeroom. This book itself, I'm happy to say, doesn't appear to have imitated the fate (at least circa 2000) of its subjects. Amazon still has new copies for sale, and it was reprinted in 2011. show less

Historically, The Purchase is fascinating as it combines several different elements of the country’s unique background. Daniel’s world is as unfamiliar to him as it is to modern readers, but it is Ms. Spalding’s succinct descriptions that allow readers to adapt and learn about this unfamiliar setting and lifestyle. The vastness of the world without towns, roads, or even neighbors plays in stark contrast to Daniel’s former life among the Quakers. The sheer number of issues Daniel show more faces upon his arrival at his new homestead emphasizes those differences. It is a world that is simultaneously very broad and yet very narrow and intriguing in both its possibilities and its limitations.

Daniel’s adoption of his new location provides readers with plenty of opportunities to learn about life on the Kentucky frontier and the hard-scrabble life that accompanies it. Surprisingly, Daniel has a fairly large number of neighbors, so the isolation that one associates with pioneering is not quite the issue it might have been. Then again, it is the interactions with these neighbors that cause a majority of the tension. Alongside frontier living is the element of slavery. Of particular interest is the idea that most of Daniel’s neighbors own slaves because of necessity and not because of any firm belief in the practice. With few inhabitants in the area and a constant battle for survival against a wilderness that does not want to be tamed, one or two slaves can make all the difference between eking out a living or total failure. While there is no excuse for the enslavement of any human, Ms. Spalding does an excellent job showing how easy it is for someone to become inured to the practice and even become involved in it in some fashion.

While the story revolves around Daniel Dickinson, he is more anti-hero than hero. He is stubborn, too passive in an aggressive environment, convinced of his superior intelligence among his family and neighbors, and incapable of compromise. Daniel’s Quaker beliefs clash with the unwritten rules of life on the frontier, not to mention the abolitionist tenets of the Quaker faith up against the nonchalant acceptance of the institution among Daniel’s new peers. He may accidentally purchase Onesimus and keep him as a slave, but his adamant insistence on maintaining all aspects of his belief system provides huge wells of guilt that keep him weak in a world where the weak just cannot survive. The rest of the characters are equally flawed and oh-so-very human. Their realistic attributes will generate a myriad of emotions within a reader – everything from frustration to disgust to pride to resignation – as they all make good and very poor choices that will continue to haunt them all.

While a reader can guess what some of the inevitable clashes will be from Daniel’s accidental purchase of Onesimus, it is the surprising arcs the story takes that keeps a reader’s interest. The compromise of Daniel’s beliefs so early in the story results in a profound stubbornness that does more harm than good. Combined with his Quaker passivity, the two traits, along with his initial actions upon arrival in the country, do more to cause the resultant scenes than anything else. Onesimus is a mere victim of Daniel’s belief system.

Given its subject matter, The Purchase is not the cheeriest of novels. The first-person account of slavery is as rough and disturbing as one would expect, while the characters and all their faults do little to nothing to ease a reader’s angst. Throughout the story, the overwhelming feelings of distress among all the characters, free and slave, serve to emphasize the arduousness of life on the frontier. Much like its frontier setting, it is stark and brutal and not for the easily distressed. show less

What happens when you are faced with betraying your principles and beliefs? Can it destroy your entire life? In Linda Spalding's The Purchase, her main character, Daniel, is a Quaker who mistakenly buys a slave after having his whole life already thrown into turmoil. But his purchase of another human being marks his life and all the future decisions in it like nothing else.

Opening with Daniel Dickinson, his new, young wife, and his five children leaving the Quaker settlement they call home show more after Daniel's shunning by the community for marrying his young servant after his wife's untimely death, the family leaves behind all that anchors them in life and sets out on a hard journey to a new home they must carve out of the western Virginia wilderness for themselves. That they are completely unequipped for this new life and will make mistake after mistake in this new place is immediately evident in the narrative. Daniel knows nothing about the woods around them; he is no farmer, and in fact seems fairly unskilled and uniformed about the hardships he's going to put his family and himself through. It is a fool's errand on which he has embarked and one that will spawn unrelenting misery and tragedy after tragedy. Daniel's poor choices are only compounded when he takes the only cash he has to a farm implement auction and instead of buying tools, ends up buying a slave named Onesimus, having to forfeit his favorite mare, a horse that was to help him establish his farm in order to pay for the slave he doesn't want. His intention of eventually earning enough money to buy back his horse and to free Onesimus, while morally righteous, is a plan even less well-conceived, given his general ineptitude for this harsh life, than his plan to move the family into the wilderness in the first place.

Unfolding slowly over a number of years, the narrative is told by a rotating cast of characters. It is hard to tell which character is intended to carry the story as just when the mind and motivation of the character narrating starts to come into focus, the novel changes perspective and moves on in time. Add to this the fact that none of the characters are particularly appealing, every last one of them accepts being a doormat at each turn, perhaps nurtured by patriarch Daniel's weak and frustrating passivity. He wants to hold onto his dearly held Quaker beliefs but instead of lending him a strength and stature, he becomes a pitiful mockery of a principled person, leading not only the other characters to be frustrated by him but also the reader as well. Certainly the life that the family leads is a hard, brutal, and uncivilized one but the tone of the entire novel is relentlessly grim and unbending. Daniel's flaws help to explain and justify his children's attraction and allure to violence at odds with his half-hearted teachings and make the resulting tragedies inevitable. But over all, the book does a good job showing the soul-destroying power of the frontier and the difficult life that anyone choosing to try and tame it would have faced. Historically the novel seems mostly accurate although one bit that was glaringly wrong to me and made me shake my fist at the sloppiness of the passage has a large green log being thrown onto a fire and immediately blazing with flame. This does not happen with green wood. Seasoned and aged? If the fire is hot enough to sustain a round log, sure. Green wood? Not a chance in this world. And while complaining about a detail like this might seem to be nitpicking, this is a time and a place where wood fires are vital to survival and so it's not an insignificant error. This is definitely not a novel for anyone looking for a story of redemption or hope and glimmers of humor or even contentment are completely missing as well. It is a depressing and downtrodden tale from first to last. show less

This book is beautifully written, but it is indeed very dark. The prose is lyrical, but stripped-down. This is an historical novel written in the manner of Thomas Hardy. It is unrelenting in the sadness and despair that the author portrays. The setting is Virginia at the very beginning of the 19 century. Ms. Hardy has managed to create a world within the confines of the covers of this book. The story is about a young Quaker man who's wife has just died, leaving him with five motherless show more children. He has brought a young Methodist servant into his house to help him with this brood and decides that he can only protect her and his family if she becomes his wife, even though she is not much older than his oldest child. As a result of this decision he is shunned from the Quaker community in Pennsylvania, and decides to set out for Virginia in order to start a farm. Daniel is lost out in the real world, and he makes some rather unfortunate choices as he tries to carve out a life for his family in the harsh Virginia wilderness. Daniel's choices and actions cause repercussions that are to be felt for years after and they rock his little family to the core. This is a harsh and unforgiving land that he settles in and every member of his family has to work against tremendous hardships in order to survive. These characters are so real and so incredibly human and the picture created of pioneer life so realistic, that I felt like I was there living in Southern Virginia, at the edges of the great American frontier. It is not an easy book to read because Ms. Spalding does not stint on the detail of the hardships and degradations that early pioneers had to endure. And the picture that is painted of slavery and of the lives of slaves during this time is unrelenting and sometimes unbearable. This book is a well-deserved winner of the 2012 Governor General's literary award. show less