I wanted to like this novel more than I did. I had the opportunity to attend an author talk before I read this and I really appreciated getting the author’s perspective on the story she told, how she structured it and other choices that she made. So that did help me appreciate some parts but in other ways, I wonder if reading it before the event might have been better. This isn’t really the kind of novel you spoil, especially when the blurb shares small details about the generations of women that make up the novel, and yet, would I have enjoyed it more if certain reveals hadn’t been strongly alluded to in the conversation, and then strongly foreshadowed early in the novel?
The novel jumps back and forth between characters, between timelines and generations. It starts with Tati’s quest to find out more about her absent, unnamed father (she knows he was married when her mom Nadia became involved with him), and goes from there in introducing Tati’s matriarchal line. Williams said she didn’t want to do the chronological timeline one generally sees in these types of generational novels, that tend to follow the family from slavery to modern day. Instead she jumps back and forth because it’s reflective of how people learn their own history – stories leading to other stories. She also uses different themes or shared experiences to help anchor transitions, such as Nadia and Ruby’s shared talent in doing hair as one example.
I tended to be more interested in some of the earlier ancestors though Nadia and Tati had a bit more page time compared to the other women. Part of the challenge might be that this is more the kind of novel to read slowly and savor while I was just excited to have some uninterrupted reading time after a busy week and this may have been the wrong choice for a long, uninterrupted afternoon of reading. Williams also mentioned that she was a poet first and I think that led to language that required a different kind of read to fully appreciate – or an audiobook version: the parts she read out loud sounded better in her voice than purely on the page.
I still think it’s a good intergenerational novel and it used the women of this family to explore quite a few different experience from history but I think I wanted to feel more connected earlier on? There’s also an interesting theme here about how even in Land’s End, the Dupree women aren’t quite a part of the community since they are landowners and seen as a bit outside/other from everyone else, and they in turn act as a closed unit, even to their own husband’s.
