The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel
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Katy Simpson Smith. (2014). The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel. HarperCollins.

Katy Simpson Smith. 2014. The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel. HarperCollins.

Katy Simpson Smith, The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2014.

Katy Simpson Smith. The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2014.

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• role: Author
• name: Katy Simpson Smith

title

The Story of Land and Sea

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   • bioText:

     Katy Simpson Smith is the author of a study of early American motherhood, We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835, and a novel, The Story of Land and Sea. She lives in New Orleans.

   • name: Katy Simpson Smith

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2014-08-26T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Story of Land and Sea

fullDescription

Set in a small coastal town in North Carolina during the waning years of the American Revolution, this incandescent debut novel follows three generations of family—fathers and daughters, mother and son, master and slave, characters who yearn for redemption amidst a heady brew of war, kidnapping, slavery, and love.

Drawn to the ocean, ten-year-old Tabitha wanders the marshes of her small coastal village and listens to her father's stories about his pirate voyages and the mother she never knew. Since the loss of his wife Helen, John has remained land-bound for their daughter, but when Tab contracts yellow fever, he turns to the sea once more. Desperate to save his daughter, he takes her aboard a sloop bound for Bermuda, hoping the salt air will heal her.

Years before, Helen herself was raised by a widowed father. Asa, the devout owner of a small plantation, gives his daughter a young slave named Moll for her tenth birthday. Left largely on their own, Helen and Moll develop a close but uneasy companionship. Helen gradually takes over the running of the plantation as the girls grow up, but when she meets John, the pirate turned Continental soldier, she flouts convention and her father's wishes by falling in love. Moll, meanwhile, is forced into marriage with a stranger. Her only solace is her son, Davy, whom she will protect with a passion that defies the bounds of slavery.

In this elegant, evocative, and haunting debut, Katy Simpson Smith captures the singular love between parent and child, the devastation of love lost, and the lonely paths we travel in the name of renewal.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Washington Post
   • content: "Haunting...The Story of Land and Sea's finely wrought language blends startling details of the everyday with a dreamy, aphoristic quality. The effect is to root the novel in its historical moment but to reach toward the universal in its exploration of love and grief."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Oxford American
   • content: "THE STORY OF LAND AND SEA is a memorable debut, rich with small, sharp moments of observation and understanding...A deeply introspective novel...Smith weaves intricate patterns of motive and action that result in heartbreaking moral ambiguity."
3. • premium: False
   • source: O, the Oprah Magazine
   • content: "A luminous debut..."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Anita Shreve
   • content: "The arresting prose, vividly original characters, and narrative drive with which Smith tells this story of desperate familial love on a long-ago coast provided this reader with several hours of pure pleasure and a rare glimpse of grace in a fictional world."
5. • premium: False
   • source: David Gates
   • content: "Smith hasn't merely evoked late-18th century American lives on shore and at sea-she's invented them afresh...She doesn't peddle the cozy illusion that, after all, these were people just like us; while reading THE STORY OF LAND AND SEA, we become just like them."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Bret Anthony Johnston
   • content: "A pristine and powerful book...[Smith's] voice is a poet's and her vision is as expansive as the ocean, as the history in its depths. In her gorgeous and heart-rending first novel, she lays bare the hearts of parent and child, slave and master, and, most impressively, her readers."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Huffington Post
   • content: "Smith's narrative flawlessly blends the beauty and idealism of American independence with the hypocrisy and devastation that lay beneath it...Smith's evocation of the humanity of both slave-owner and slave never falters, leading readers to a troubling and heartrending conclusion."
8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     June 2, 2014
     A bereaved father and his son-in-law struggle to understand the tragedies that have befallen them in Smith’s debut novel, which is set among the marshes of coastal North Carolina during the uncertain time of the American Revolution. John, a widowed soldier, is perplexed by the faith of others in a God who takes so much and gives so little. When his beloved daughter, Tabitha, contracts yellow fever, he stows her away with him on a schooner bound for Bermuda in a desperate attempt to curb the ravages of the disease. Tabitha’s grandfather, Asa, owner of a small plantation called Long Ridge, grieves over the loss of his granddaughter. He also mourns her mother, his only daughter Helen, whom John stole away for a happy interlude of love and freedom on the high seas before her untimely death in childbirth. Helen’s slave companion, Moll, like Asa, feels left behind, married off to another slave she did not know. Her only consolation is her feisty first-born son Davy, although she has other children, all girls. When John decides to strike out over land on a journey westward, Moll’s heart is irrevocably shattered. Smith’s soulful language of loss is almost biblical, and the descriptions of her characters’ sorrows are poetic and moving.

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     June 15, 2014
     

     Set on the North Carolina coast during and following the American Revolution, this debut novel centers on Asa, owner of a small turpentine plantation, whose daughter, Helen, falls in love with soldier and sometime pirate John and goes to sea with him after the war when her father refuses to bless the marriage. Rounding out the cast of primary characters is Helen's slave, Moll, whose lack of choice in creating her own destiny is sharply contrasted with Helen's. Somewhat ironically, despite the setting in a time of war, it is the females' lives that are most at risk, as three generations of women succumb to childbirth or illness. There is a pervasive sense of loneliness and loss throughout the novel. Smith's spare prose and storytelling style is resonant of oral history or folk tales, and the early chapters focusing on John and his daughter Tabitha, and her desire for the sea, call to mind Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife. At first, this style creates something of a remove for the reader, and it's not until the story of John and Helen's courtship that one begins to be emotionally invested. VERDICT Despite the many sad events, the reader eventually engages, and the novel ends with a note of hope.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

     Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

247

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shortDescription

Set in a small coastal town in North Carolina during the waning years of the American Revolution, this incandescent debut novel follows three generations of family—fathers and daughters, mother and son, master and slave, characters who yearn for redemption amidst a heady brew of war, kidnapping, slavery, and love.

Drawn to the ocean, ten-year-old Tabitha wanders the marshes of her small coastal village and listens to her father's stories about his pirate voyages and the mother she never knew. Since the loss of his wife Helen, John has remained land-bound for their daughter, but when Tab contracts yellow fever, he turns to the sea once more. Desperate to save his daughter, he takes her aboard a sloop bound for Bermuda, hoping the salt air will heal her.

Years before, Helen herself was raised by a widowed father. Asa, the devout owner of a small plantation, gives his daughter a young slave named Moll for her tenth birthday. Left largely on their own, Helen and...

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HarperCollins

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   • description: Fiction / Literary
3. • code: FIC045000
   • description: Fiction / Family Life / General