August 1, 2022

In 1792, formerly enslaved Black man Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discovered Malaga Island off the coast of Maine and created a racially integrated community that endured for a century. Then white folks arrived with the goal of "cleansing" the island, threatening to send off residents in boats (but for one light-skinned boy) unless they submitted to white domination. The Pulitzer Prize--winning Harding reimagines Malaga Island and its terrible fate.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 28, 2022
Pulitzer winner Harding (Tinkers) suffuses deep feeling into this understated yet wrenching story inspired by an isolated mixed-raced community’s forced resettlement in 1912 Maine. Formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish-born wife Patience settled Apple Island more than a century earlier. Now, the hardscrabble community includes gender-bending and incestuous siblings Theophilus and Candace Lark and their four, mentally disabled children; a Civil War veteran named Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, who lives in a hollow tree; Irish sisters Iris and Violet McDermott, who raise three orphaned Penobscot children; and the Honeys’ descendents. Christian missionary and retired schoolteacher Matthew Diamond has spent the past five years visiting the island during the summer to teach the community’s children. A deeply prejudiced man, he prays for the strength to overcome his “visceral, involuntary repulsion” to Black people, and is continually shocked at the children’s quick minds as well as Ethan Honey’s talent for drawing. With eugenics on the rise, the state sets in motion a plan to clear the island and Diamond contrives to send Ethan to a colleague in Massachusetts, where he can pass as white and study art. Harding’s close-third narration gives shape and weight to the community members’ complicated feelings about their displacement, while his magisterial prose captures a sense of place (“the island a granite pebble in the frigid Atlantic shallows”). It’s a remarkable achievement.

Starred review from December 1, 2022
A superb achievement, Pulitzer Prize-winner Harding's (Enon, 2013) third novel fictionalizes a shameful true episode in American history. In 1912, the mixed-race residents of Malaga Island off Maine's coast, who had lived there for generations, were forcibly removed for reasons of "public health" and tourism development. The pseudoscience of eugenics lay behind the decision. In Harding's version, Esther Honey is the matriarch of a poor, close-knit family of African and Irish descent; other residents on Apple Island include the Lark family, the McDermott sisters, their Penobscot foster children, and eccentric carpenter Zachary Hand to God Proverbs. When retired schoolteacher Matthew Diamond arrives to preach and teach, he recognizes his prejudice yet finds several gifted pupils, including 15-year-old, light-skinned Ethan Honey, a talented artist. Events spiral downward when a committee from the governor's council takes notice and comes to investigate. The injustice they impose feels infuriating. Harding combines an engrossing plot with deft characterizations and alluring language deeply attuned to nature's artistry. The biblical parallels, which naturally align with the characters' circumstances, add depth, and enhance the universality of the themes. Readers must gingerly parse some winding, near-paragraph-long sentences, but this gorgeously limned portrait about family bonds, the loss of innocence, the insidious effects of racism, and the innate worthiness of individual lives will resonate long afterward.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from November 15, 2022
Harding's third novel revisits an appalling moment in Maine history. Early in the 20th century, the racially diverse residents of a small island community in Maine were evicted and displaced. The local authorities who carried out this task on Malaga Island cited science as one of their motivations--but what they called science is now obvious as eugenics, and these nominally lawful actions are now seen for what they truly were: a crime. Harding's novel draws from this history, and its epigraph from the Maine Coast Heritage Trust gives the broad outline of what the reader can expect. But Harding is after something bigger here, using this fictionalized version of history both to comment on the interconnectedness of various coastal communities and to explore the ephemeral qualities that can be lost when regarding historical events from decades away. Harding focuses on different characters over the course of the novel, including a young man named Ethan Honey, the descendant of a former slave, whose artistic skills offer the promise of a better future; Esther Honey, Ethan's mother, who grapples with her own haunted family history and possesses a stunning knowledge of all things Shakespearean; and the well-intentioned retired White schoolteacher Matthew Diamond, who begins the novel "oblivious to the greater, probably utter, catastrophe" his presence is going to spark but finds unexpected moral reserves. As these characters find themselves rethinking their places in the world, Harding summons up lyrical sheets of prose, including one of the most evocative descriptions of a lobster dinner you're likely to encounter. He has an eye for a striking image, as when Ethan is painting: "Put the haystacks in the sky, bristling and sharp, rasping across the lowering blue." It's a brief book that carries the weight of history. A moving account of community and displacement.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from December 1, 2022

Off the coast of Maine, Malaga Island supported a racially integrated community until the early 1900s, when the state evicted the islanders. In Pulitzer Prize winner Harding's (Tinkers) persuasive reimagining of the community, formerly enslaved Black man Benjamin Honey and his white Irish wife, Patience, land on Apple Island in 1793 and form an outpost that by 1911 includes their descendants, two sisters raising three Penobscot orphans, a brood of wayward children whose parents might be brother and sister, and Black Union Army veteran Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, who expertly carves biblical scenes into the tree where he shelters. The island isn't exactly paradise--there's cold, hunger, and an abusive father--but the community hangs together until the arrival of eugenics-minded white folks from the mainland. Matthew Diamond, a well-intentioned white preacher/teacher battling his own prejudices to live on the island in summertime, knows that the community's days are numbered and determines to save gifted young artist Ethan Honey, fair-skinned enough to send to the mainland for tutoring. His decision has sore consequences, and readers must wonder whether it was less heinous than the actions of the real Governor's Council, which dispatched all the islanders, institutionalized some, and exhumed their dead. VERDICT Harding's luscious, perfectly knit narrative delivers a sober understanding of human nature and racial hatred.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.