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Emily Barton

Autor/a de Brookland

4+ obres 507 Membres 36 Ressenyes

Sobre l'autor

Emily Barton graduated from Harvard & the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She's a yoga instructor & book reviewer for "The New York Times". She lives in Brooklyn. (Bowker Author Biography)

Inclou el nom: Emily Barton

Crèdit de la imatge: http://www.dentontaylor.com

Obres de Emily Barton

Brookland (2006) 271 exemplars
The Book of Esther: A Novel (2016) 119 exemplars
The Testament of Yves Gundron (2000) 116 exemplars
Erin Parish 1 exemplars

Obres associades

Hebbes 2 : 15 smaakmakers voor het voorjaar — Col·laborador — 3 exemplars

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Ressenya escrita per a Crítics Matiners de LibraryThing .
Very different than anything I have ever read. I enjoyed reading it.
 
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Mellllls | Hi ha 25 ressenyes més | Apr 11, 2023 |
Okay, so here's the thing: I liked this book overall. It built a very realistic world, there were a wealth of characters and cultures, Barton displayed the ability to build conflicting and negative traits into main characters that so impressed me in Brookland, and the writing style and structure was nothing short of stunning.

But...it took me 19 days to read this 415-page book.

Why, though, that's the question. I noticed that the slowest parts for me were the beginning--about the first 50 pages--and the last 100 pages, take a little. While I did end up appreciating the world building, it took a little bit of time for me to get into it. I went to a school with a large Jewish student body, I'm very well versed in the Christian Bible (if I do say so myself), and I love stories with complex world building, but I still struggled to get into the right frame of reference. I figured out pretty quickly that this was probably due to the idiosyncratic spellings/namings of different places. I get the desire to do it, to make it clear that this is an imagined world, and appreciate the effort to distinguish fact from fiction. It's something most authors don't take responsibility for. Honestly, I think my complaint about the country confusion would have been solved if I hadn't been reading an ARC with "TK" where the map should have been

To be honest, the book felt a bit patchy, and not just with the pacing. There were some gaps in logic as well, though some preliminary research on the Khazars has answered a couple questions: How could Esther have avoided being to exposed to different forms of Judaism and different cultures in such a diverse city in a diverse country? Why did the mechanical horse Seleme show so much personality when it was repeatedly stated that she was no more than a machine, unlike the golems? Why was Esther the only one so concerned about the Germanii's army and intentions until the last minute? Why did no one have a sensible plan of attack laid out instead of a vague idea? Why were the Germanii trying to get to the Russ oil fields via Khazara? (Admittedly I just looked up some maps of Russian oil fields on Google Images, and this can be countered either by saying that the Germanii hadn’t defeated the Russ or by saying “it’s an AU, get over it!”) Why hadn’t the industrial age brought weapons, vehicles, and some factories to Khazara, as it did to other parts of the world at that point in history? How on earth was a mechanical horse easier to make than a car? Why did the Khazars only have wooden aeroplanes if they had mechanical freakin’ horses?

All that said, the things I loved about Brookland were still here: beautiful prose, strong women characters even in a sea of men, beautiful world building (even if the scale was daunting for a reader—can’t imagine what it would have been like to write!), complex characters who aren’t all good or all bad, who don’t always do what they say but also aren’t always aware of that fact. It’s some of the most human fiction I’ve read. Yeah, maybe I need to suspend my disbelief a bit higher than usual, but it’s a good exercise, and easily done when the reward is the lovely tapestry of history, fiction, multiculturalism, ethics/morality, diversity, and more.

I struggled with this book, I’ll admit. As I said, I think I would have had an easier time if the map had been included to help me at least keep the countries sorted out. But I would still recommend it to anyone up for a bit of a challenge. Fans of complicated mythologies like [b:The Lord of the Rings|33|The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3)|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1411114164s/33.jpg|3462456] will find this a welcome brain stretch that we so rarely get in our vaguely-medieval obsessed western world. People who’ve grown up with Judaism and can read the original Hebrew probably won’t struggle as much with the names as I sometimes did. Anyone taking and liking that infamous Kabbalah course at Muhlenberg might find this a fun application of their lessons.

Still looking forward to what Emily Barton will write next…and in the meantime, apparently there’s [b:The Testament of Yves Gundron|525465|The Testament of Yves Gundron|Emily Barton|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347564224s/525465.jpg|368631] to hunt down!
… (més)
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books-n-pickles | Hi ha 25 ressenyes més | Oct 29, 2021 |
Brookland is one of the best books I’ve read in a long, long time. It brings a new meaning to the term “historical fiction,” not just presenting us with a fictional account of historic events, but also giving us an original fictional event in a historic setting.

In the years around and after the American Revolution and in the first few decades of the new United States, a remarkable family lives in early Brooklyn, across the water from the island of Manhattan. The title’s use of a variant of the latter tips off the reader to the variation between history and pure story. Prue Winship, the eldest daughter, learns to take over the family gin distillery in the absence of a son while also dreaming of bigger things—much bigger things.

The Winship family and sisters are large as life and realistic. It’s easy for modern writers to fall into the trap of writing those women fortunate enough to find a place in a man’s world as being so modern they’re almost our contemporaries, but Barton casts the Winship sisters, their family, and their neighbors well: there are spheres of acceptability, subworlds in which women can be as openly opinionated as men only given the right circumstances. Two of the Winship daughters, Prue (Prudence) and Tem (Temperance) (which may be the funniest name I’ve ever heard for the daughter of a distiller) fit the criteria. Pearl, the mute middle daughter, does not. Literally silenced in the way that many women of the day were figuratively silenced, she has far less control of her destiny than most other women, never mind her unusually independent sisters.

Prue dreams of building a bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan—and, with the help of her sisters and lifelong friends/fiancé and distillery foreman, begins to make it happen. The details of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Brooklyn and New York State are fine and rich, and you learn not only tidbits about life in early nineteenth century Brooklyn but bits and pieces of how the early New York State legislature worked, what modern architecture was like, how the ideals of the enlightenment influenced wealthy (if tradesman) society in the young country.

Admittedly, it’s now been almost two months since I read this book in early April, which is why I’m giving more details of what happened than how I felt. I’ll have to leave this with saying that I felt happier reading this book than I had in a long time: it’s one of those rare books that’s long enough that I didn’t feel as though it was over too quickly without being so long that I got impatient for the end. The characters were well drawn with few, if any caricatures: even the people seldom mentioned are multifaceted, like the boatman who opposes the bridge because it will ruin his business but still wishes the best for the daughters of his old friend.

Before I close off and head to the quotes, I have to spare a moment to mention the gorgeous cover design: an old print done in gold over a photo of a wooded river. The gold shines in contrast to the deep blue of the water

Quote Roundup

12) If heaven was as free from want as the domine described it, then the New-Yorkers’ insatiable need of gin & fruit meant they were living in hell.
Even before the United States has formed, here’s this idea of New York as a place of gluttony and misery. Perhaps an example of the modern informing the past? Whatever the case, it tickled me to see this idea expressed when New York is in its relative infancy.

28) Prue, Pearl, and Tem are bungled up “like Esquimaux” to explore the ice bridge be between Manhattan and Brooklyn. I had to make a note to look this up, since I was curious about when Europeans would have been in contact with Inuits for the first time. Esquimaux is apparently the French plural form of the word for Inuits, and since the term “Eskimo” is a general word applying to indigenous people all around the northern polar areas, it is quite possible that this word and knowledge of these people existed in the early/mid nineteenth century.

98) “‘For if ye love them that love you,’” he read, “‘what reward have ye?’ Why that is commerce, exchange, shilling for shilling. Anybody can do that. ‘And salute your brethren only,’—that is, if you greet only those that belong to your church or think as you think, or act as you act—‘do not even the publicans so?’“
A common enough sermon, especially in fiction, but I did like the way that this one was delivered. It’s refreshing, for Prue (and for me), to hear humor in a sermon (in a book) about such an important topic, one of the most quoted and least followed rules of Christianity.

For some reason there were no quotes for a long stretch in the middle even though I definitely remember enjoying stories of the Winship girls’ childhoods.


224) On perhaps Mr. Fischer’s fourth night in Brooklyn, Tem had banged in[to the Twin Tankards] at the close of the workday, thirsty for her pint, and poor Mr. Fischer had fallen in love with her in an instant. … “I’ve never seen such lovely gams,” Ezra Fischer said in a tone of reverence.
“Actually,” Tem said loudly, “I’ll wager you’ve never seen any gams at all, as women don’t damn well display them. Unless, of course, you are referring to your taste for whores, quite a pretty few of whom you’ll find upstairs.”
Go Tem! Also, for those of you curious, “gams” are apparently women’s legs. Tem and Prue wear trousers out of practicality from their work in the distillery.

231) Prue discovers that Pearl knows a good bit about her reasons for wanting to build a bridge, including her original thought as a child that New York was the land of the dead.
“It isn’t only that. I learned I’d been mistaken, of course, a hundred years ago.”
[Pearl]It’s for Mother & Father?
“And for myself also. To have done something that wasn’t handed down to me.” She hadn’t known she thought this until she said it.
I feel a fair bit of kinship for Prue. Though life is far different these days and parents’ work is rarely passed down to their children, I still felt, growing up, a bit like I took the place of the oldest/only son in the family. I inherited my dad’s coin collection and interests in the outdoors and working with my hands. I spent more time with him than did either of my sisters, and as much as I feel (and enjoy, to a certain extent, feeling) a responsibility for carrying on the family legacy, I still look for the thing I can do that belongs to myself, the mark I can make that is both part of and separate from my family legacy. Doubt it will be anything as monumental as a bridge, but I’m still trying to figure it out.

272) An idiot gentleman whose behavior defines the word meets Pearl for the first time. “Is she for sale, then? I’ve long fancied a wife who wouldn’t talk back to me.”
Ben said, “Oh, bless you, but she does talk back,” while Pearl wrote, Devill take you, Sir, held it up to her companion in her left hand, and continued on with her breakfast.
Go Pearl! I’d have loved to have her hit him across the face with her book, but there’s only so much fiction you can hope for, isn’t there?

285) How Prue envied [Ben] his man’s figure—his squared shoulders and even his pointy, clean-shaven chin—for how it enabled him to stand up thus before them. She loved him dearly, and at the same time felt what seemed love’s opposite: a sickening jealousy.
This is a delicate balance to strike: as I mentioned before, it’s easy to fall into the trap of making women seem so modern that they chafe against their roles in the same way that a contemporary woman, transplanted back in time, might feel. I think Barton managed the balance, though. For all her jealousy of Ben, Prue nevertheless feels constrained by the societal norms that dictate that Ben needs to speak while she remains silent: it’s not just frustration, it’s a genuine feeling that even though she knows the bridge, she can’t do this as well as he could—partly because it’s not “in a woman’s nature” and partly because that “nature” won’t permit other men to take her seriously. For all her frustration, she has more trouble crossing the divide than, I think, most women today would have.

338) The spring thaw arrived early in 1799, though it brought with it the state legislature’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery. … The Act, Prue realized, struck a fine balance between pleasing those who relied upon slave labor to make their living and assuaging those who opposed it on moral grounds: All adult slaves were to remain in bondage for the rest of their lives, though they would henceforward be called “indentured servants,” and all children born after the coming Fourth of July would be freed in the 1820s, after having given their best years of service to their masters.
I spent plenty of time in APUS History discussing the Constitutional note that slavery would be banned in the early 1800s, but I really didn’t learn much about legislative bans to slavery at the state level. This discussion was new and interesting to me (I learned a lot of history this book, mostly in the forms of characters whose names now appear on street signs and subway stops), but I also appreciated the reality of Prue’s concerns: regardless of her moral feeling about slavery, she has a business to run, one that currently depends on slave labor. Again, it’s easy for modern writers to make their historical fictional women characters abolitionist, feminist saints. I admire Barton’s successful efforts to complicate her characters in a realistic way.

354) Another difficult but wonderful moment for the women in this story. Though Prue has never gotten along with her sister-in-law, Patience, the two come to an understanding as the latter comforts the former after a difficult miscarriage. Women don’t always have to hate each other forever, just because they have different values and wildly different lives.

402) Prue had hoped for the best and half expected the worst, and could not quote force this information to fit either category.
Ah, a familiar feeling to us all, I’m sure! Though not always on the scale of what’s in this scene.

437) Prue finally comes to realize the truth of the curse she placed on her sister.
I saw the curse lay not on the words I had uttered, which had scudded away across to Mannahata never to be recalled; but in the manner in which I’d allowed them to color my behavior toward her, ever since. For 23 years I had showered my guilt upon her, thought of protecting her, bought her gifts, worry’d on her behalf; but I had never once simply looked to see in whose interest I had done all this. Had I done so, I might have seen the depth of that streak running through her, or how she felt confined or unhappy. But you see, I did not.
I found this reveal all the more powerful for how simple it is. It’s betrayal on the small scale, devastating in its pervasiveness in a way that her inability to think in Pearl’s best interests the one time Pearl has thought in her own doesn’t quite capture. It’s not just the hypocrisy of her behavior toward Pearl, it’s the definition of killing with kindness (albeit unintentionally).

465) I challenge any man who claims haunting by the dead to feel the chill of haunting by uncertainty, & I will shew you a changed man.

477) Even at that sorrowful time, perhaps the oddest thing about the whole affair seemed to me how people on both sides of the river had well nigh forgotten I’d had aught to do with the disastrous bridge. I was still Prue Winship, Distiller of Gin; but your father, wherever he went, was the Architect of the Folly. Few but Ben, Isaiah, & my own two sisters had ever known that the idea, at its origin, had been mine alone; but it struck me as passing strange how even Simon Dufresne & Theunis van Vechten lamented Ben’s misjudgment of the foundations, without once mentioning how I had drawn up the articles of our misfortune.
Prue unexpectedly benefits from the sexism of the time; even the people who saw her participation in the construction of the bridge forget her involvement in it because her actions automatically belong to her husband—both because no one would think that a woman was capable of creating something like the bridge and because her husband would be responsible for anything she did.
… (més)
 
Marcat
books-n-pickles | Hi ha 8 ressenyes més | Oct 29, 2021 |
I'm just going to start right out and say this book was incredibly confusing and difficult to get into. The author throws a bunch of names at you right away, and it's difficult to parse and find context. Then there's whole issue of the horse--is it mechanical? is it sentient? I don't know. It needs fuel, but it apparently has feelings and emotions?

Then there's the whole issue of the world itself, which again lacks context. And a young girl just marching off on her own to war and no one questions her much along the way? It all just seems so unrealistic. I made it to the end, but it was a bit of a chore to do so.

[Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from the publisher via Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review.]
… (més)
1 vota
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crtsjffrsn | Hi ha 25 ressenyes més | Aug 27, 2021 |

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Obres
4
També de
1
Membres
507
Popularitat
#48,898
Valoració
½ 3.6
Ressenyes
36
ISBN
19
Llengües
2

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