Catherwood - Hardcover

Youmans, Marly

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374119724 ISBN 13: 9780374119720

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1996

Synopsis

Lost in the woods of the New World in 1678, Catherwood and her one-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, find themselves in a harsh and unforgiving, yet majestic, landscape through which the frantic mother searches for human life.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

On the English frontier in 17th-century American, a short walk in the woods turns into a months-long nightmare for a newly settled mother and her young daughter when they lose their way, as first- novelist Youmans brings keen insight and a relentless focus to one woman's suffering and sorrow. In 1676, having survived a tempest at sea, Catherwood and gentleman husband Gabriel, originally destined with a group of kin for Virginia, find New York's wilderness to their liking and obtain land in the Albany region. A busy round of clearing, planting, and building ensues, so that before two years pass a substantial house and gardens have been hewn out of the woods--and Cath has a one- year-old, Elizabeth, to share her days. The idyll is shattered one afternoon in May, however, when Cath misses the trail home after visiting a nearby cousin, and she and Elizabeth wander ever farther away from home while desperately searching for some sign of civilization. A knowledge of herb lore and the presence in her pack of flint, steel, and a knife keep away hunger and cold, but as spring gives way to summer, and summer to fall without any alteration in their fortunes, survival becomes less certain. Elizabeth catches a fever and dies, leaving her mother so bereft that she cannot leave her body behind. Cremating the child allows Cath to carry away a few bones, but her own mental and physical state swiftly deteriorates. In her final despair she stumbles at last on a settlement (Westfield, Mass.), where she collapses and is nursed slowly to health. The Puritans keep apart from her as a nonbeliever, but send for Gabriel at her request, and as winter arrives he appears to take her home. The tender moments between mother and child are evoked most powerfully, but the farther one moves from this intimate sphere, the less satisfying the novel becomes. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

As she proved in her first novel, Little Jordan, Youmans can employ lyrical prose and a terse narrative to produce powerful writing. As a young child, the eponymous heroine, dirty and half-wild, was sold to a kindhearted young gentleman named Lacey Grevel, as a "gift" for his mother, who had lost her three daughters to plague. Raised at stately Grevel House, Catherwood was civilized and loved by Elisabeth Grevel, then married to a decent young man named Gabriel Lyte in 1676. The new couple sail for Virginia, but they land instead in "Neue York" and settle near "Albanie" to carve a living from a fairly hospitable land. Then one day Cath and her baby, Elizabeth, stray into the unpeopled wilderness, where Catherwood's character undergoes a new and agonizing refinement. Her story draws strength from the stark, simple language Youmans employs to describe both the hardships and delights of solitude, and the deep, uncomplicated joy of the mother-child bond when it is allowed to flourish uninterrupted. Despite the dangers of an utterly New World, Cath and Elisabeth make their lives bountiful and even happy as they search for a sign of human habitation, always believing they are bound by invisible strands to their beloved Gabriel. When winter comes and their idyll turns to ordeal and tragedy, Catherwood's staunchness in the face of death earns her a ravishing and near-miraculous ending, a second rescue, as it were. This is a subtle but magnetic novel, at once a fable, a historical romance (with time and place authentically and indelibly rendered) and a study of motherhood's most primitive impulses, whose elegant language will reward patient reading.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0374119724
• ISBN 13: 9780374119720
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 165