The Exiles is a very different kind of “settler story,” isn’t it? So often, history focuses on simplified stories of “brave” men who forge into what they consider a frontier to build a new country. I talked with Christina about inspiration decades in the making, the responsibility she felt toward those who lived the history she fictionalizes, and the upsides of swapping a virtual book tour for the traditional traveling version. These disparate elements combine to make it her best work yet. It is in some ways a quiet book, focusing on the innermost thoughts and feelings of its main characters-but it’s also epic in scope, addressing matters of life and death, choices and consequences, and the founding of a new nation.
Realizing that moments of facing fear head-on lead to moments of the greatest ecstasy and empowerment, that our courage today means more than we could ever predict-to our daughters, and their daughters, to the future of the world.With starred reviews from Library Journal and Kirkus, a TV deal with Bruna Papandrea’s Made Up Stories already inked, and places on a half-dozen lists of the year’s most anticipated books, Christina Baker Kline’s new novel The Exiles is poised to make a splash. You’ll open this novel because of history, read on because of story, and close it knowing more about your own life, right here, right now. The author's ability to weave fact with fiction, tragedy with moments of hope, and the everyday with the universal will leave you immersed, wanting more. Save it for a time when you feel grounded, safe, but do read it. This is a novel for our times, and a novel that will stay with you. It’s amazing these characters are based on real women from this era who bequeathed today’s women freedom by their lives well lived at all costs.
The author’s quest for complete authenticity will be evident to all readers of historical fiction.
She's also a great storyteller who engages you with a character and place fully, making you love them, making it very difficult to lose them. Christina Baker Kline’s acknowledgements prove this novel may be her most well-researched, historically true publication to date. The faint of heart or empathic may need breaks from the pain etched on nearly every page. This novel would be a page-turner if not filled with dark despair at almost every turn, if not its graphic depiction of the raping of land and women.
0 kommentar(er)
