A Reckoning
A Novel
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
As the deeply moving and troubling account of a family's breakdown, A Reckoning is the perfect companion to Linda Spalding's bestselling, award-winning novel, The Purchase.
It opens in the spring of 1855, when John Dickinson is involved in a shameful secret that will require a tragic decision. The family's resources have been wasted by a reckless brother who holds all of them hostage and, adding fuel to John's desperation, the enslaved workers have been visited by a Canadian abolitionist who pushes them to escape. Bry does, and his pursuit of freedom will involve a dangerous quest to find his mother and child in Canada.
Meanwhile, the Dickinsons become fugitives of another kind, escaping their losses in a wagon en route to the West that will eventually be loaded onto a Missouri river boat for a dark adventure. Forests and rivers prevail in this story, and each person will be tested, especially thirteen-year-old Martin, whose lonely journey with a pet bear is almost mythic.
Spalding, a Kansas native who lives in Toronto, writes with irresistible force and breathtaking passion. Her language is stunning, her voice unique. A Reckoning confirms her place at the forefront of Canadian literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spalding's excellent fifth novel, after The Purchase, is a drama set in the late 1850s as conflicts over slavery and abolition tear apart a Virginia plantation family. The Dickinson farm is run by two half-brothers: Benjamin, a brutal slave owner, and John, a circuit-riding preacher who manages the farm, which is a financial failure. A stranger arrives claiming to be a bird-watching naturalist, but he is really an ardent Yankee abolitionist intent on convincing the Dickinson slaves to run away to freedom in Canada. Slaves escape, the bank takes the farm, and the family begins an arduous and painful wagon train journey to a hopeful new life in Kansas or Nebraska. John abandons his family to search for the sold enslaved girl he loves, further fracturing any relationship with his wife and children. The family's trek west is fraught with peril, hardship, disappointment, and injury, while slave catchers pursue runaways north and abolitionists and pro-slavery border ruffians fight in Kansas and Missouri. Spalding's novel is a grim tale of pre Civil War tensions, economic despair, and family disintegration, rife with historical detail.
