At the Edge of the Orchard

The Goodenough parents, James and Sadie, are singularly ill-suited to one another, which has tragic consequences for a family trying to scratch out a life in frontier Ohio. As the family tears itself apart, their youngest son, Robert, heads West, always West, further and further West, taking nothing with him but his father's unbounded, possibly irrational, love for trees. After working his way West through countless of the usual ways (stable boy? check. ranch hand? check. gold miner? check.), Robert becomes a tree agent, collecting and shipping specimens to England's landed elite, while drifting in and out of the life of Molly, a camp cook and sometimes prostitute fleeing her own Eastern horrors.

Too much historical fiction uses war as its backdrop, as a prop to move the story along. Often these are very good books: I Shall Be Near You (American Civil War), The Summer Before the War (World War I), or All the Light We Cannot See (World War II). All are excellent books, and yet at the end of the day, the war looms as large or larger than any character any of these authors could have created. One of the glorious things about Tracy Chevalier's At the Edge of the Orchard is that it stands alone, separate of larger events. The setting, in fact, is primarily the middle of nowhere, both in time (1830s-1850s) and place (Black Swamp, Ohio). The California gold rush makes an appearance, but its the characters in Orchard, as well as Chevalier's original and compelling plot, that drive this book forward.

Not only are the characters and plot praise-worthy, so is the prose. This is a novel told from - and written in - four highly distinct perspectives. Chevalier has taken care to give each character a unique voice, one that is perfectly suited to the temperament she has created throughout the novel. In short, At the Edge of the Orchard is a story whose core is revealed slowly, the layers gradually unpeeling, like an onion: pungent, rich, and raw.