Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Buy it, read it, enjoy it!, 29 Jul 2008
The most amazing book I've read in a long time-a novel set in 1917 in the South Dakota Badlands,and told from the perspective a Negro woman, Rachel living a life of unbelievable hardship on an isolated ranch with her ex-soldier husband Isaac.
Married as a business arrangement,they have a family- he will never leave the ranch because he feels he will no longer be equal with the remailning white ranchers and will lose face. There is a drought, a baby is on the way......
Rachel must decide where her loyalties lie- to her husband or to her children- should she return to Chicago?
Set against the 1917 race riots and war in Europe,this novel is thought provoking and told from a unique point of view.
Please beg, borrow or steal a copy!!
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Powerful New Book, 22 Aug 2008
"I still see her, our Liz, sitting on a plank, dangling over the well." So begins the powerful new book by Ann Weisgarber with its longing for a place and a time past and, also, for Liz who will remain in our minds precarious and forever over that well in the Dakota Badlands with her bony six-year-old frame and her worry that wearing her brother's hand-me-downs would make her a boy.
Rachel DuPree, the narrator hero of the book and Liz's mother, is a "Negro" woman from Chicago at the turn of the 20th century--a generation removed from official slavery though struggling with its practical and psychological aftereffects, nevertheless. Hers is the story of an escape and a bargain during which--through which--she matures from a simple girl to a woman of experience and character.
Rachel, a girl of the city, moves to the Badlands with her Army veteran black husband, Isaac, whom she meets first when he returns from the war in Cuba and steals her heart with his blue uniform and proud carriage and gentlemanly bow and creased map of the West and dream of a new start. Isaac is "even taller and fairer than his mother," Mrs. Elizabeth DuPree, for whom Rachel works. Mrs. DuPree, the owner of the DuPree Boarding House for Negro Men in Chicago, the one with "standards" who takes only the men who work the day shift at the slaughterhouses. Mrs. Elizabeth DuPree of sharp looks and fine meals who feels responsible for "advancing the respectability of hard-working Negroes" and who--channeling some of the finest Jane Austen characters and transporting them a troubled century forward--will not likely forgive Rachel, a dark-skinned girl of lower class, for marrying her son--that ultimate betrayal.
The book is so populated by honest characters and moments and settings, it is hard to know which one to highlight. There are the men of the Boarding House with "spirits worn down by the butchering of screaming animals" and sustained by Rachel's pies and memories of a "back home" where "[n]eighbors were friendly, bosses were fair, and the girls were the prettiest in the world."
There is, once Rachel and Isaac arrive in the Badlands and set up house and a family, the unforgiving harshness of nature, draught and dust devils and deep empty wells and grit in the eyes but also beauty--the smell of wood, fresh-cut lumber used in building a shelter with "raw crispness that made a person think about the goodness of the Earth."
There is the gentleness of a mother and daughter singing a lullaby in the barn as a beloved milk cow lies dying and then, as though there is no time to waste in getting to the living, a dance in the same spot, a formal dance by the daughter as though at a prom.
Life is here denominated one bucket of water and mouthful of milk at a time. Wisdom is here borne of hard work. "There are all kinds of ways to earn respect," Isaac reminds Rachel as they sacrifice to buy more land and as she considers the bargain she has made in coming to the Badlands with a man she hardly knew. "A man can't ever have too much. Especially if that man's black."
In the midst of this struggle walks another character, a delightfully-named Squaw woman--Mrs. Fills the Pipe--who weaves through the tale as a thread with her own personal history and a past and future interlaced with our hero's. And others: shopkeepers, townspeople, old Army buddies of Isaac, homesteaders black and white, and another Indian woman with a child--an apparition really, a demanding one--who helps Rachel to an unwanted realization. Rachel is a keen observers of all this--her circumstances and her husband and, also, herself--not idealized but complex with strengths and confusions and prejudices of her own, growing over the years equal to her trials and coming ultimately to an astonishing decision--a modern, forward-looking one channeling now not characters of Austen but the great Russians, especially the recently deceased Solzhenitsyn--leaving this reader satiated yet hoping for a sequel.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Savoured every word..., 17 Jun 2009
Just sometimes I read a book which makes me slow up and savour every word and this was one of them. I have a shelf of books which I keep to re read one day in my dotage and this is definitely heading for it. It explores vast ideas of love, life, motherhood, American cultural history and a whole lot more in beautifully understated language. A brilliant story which sears images into your head which will stay there. The opening sequence picture of the little girl and the well is poignant beyond belief... prepare to be hooked in from page one. Loved it.
PS I read the comment saying it was like Catherine Cookson's writing and I couldn't disagree more... The Personal History of Rachel DuPree is intelligent writing for readers who like space to imagine for themselves and to identify their own poignancies.
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