The Story of Land and Sea
Katy Simpson Smith, 2014
HarperCollins
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062335951
Summary
Set in a small coastal town in North Carolina during the waning years of the American Revolution, this incandescent debut novel follows three generations of family—fathers and daughters, mother and son, master and slave—characters who yearn for redemption amid a heady brew of war, kidnapping, slavery, and love.
Drawn to the ocean, ten-year-old Tabitha wanders the marshes of her small coastal village and listens to her father's stories about his pirate voyages and the mother she never knew.
Since the loss of his wife, Helen, John has remained land-bound for their daughter, but when Tab contracts yellow fever, he turns to the sea once more. Desperate to save his daughter, he takes her aboard a sloop bound for Bermuda, hoping the salt air will heal her.
Years before, Helen herself was raised by a widowed father. Asa, the devout owner of a small plantation, gives his daughter a young slave named Moll for her tenth birthday. Left largely on their own, Helen and Moll develop a close but uneasy companionship.
Helen gradually takes over the running of the plantation as the girls grow up, but when she meets John, the pirate turned Continental soldier, she flouts convention and her father's wishes by falling in love. Moll, meanwhile, is forced into marriage with a stranger. Her only solace is her son, Davy, whom she will protect with a passion that defies the bounds of slavery.
In this elegant, evocative, and haunting debut, Katy Simpson Smith captures the singular love between parent and child, the devastation of love lost, and the desperate paths we travel in the name of renewal. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1985-86
• Where—Jackson, Mississippi, USA
• Education—B.A., Mount Holyoke College; M.F.A. Bennington College; Ph.D., University
of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• Currently—lives in New Orleans, Louisiana
Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She attended Mount Holyoke College and received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She has been working as an adjunct professor at Tulane University and lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Books
2013 - We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835.
2014 - The Story of Land and Sea
2016 - Free Men
(Author bio adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Set in the years around the Revolutionary War in a North Carolina coastal town, Katy Simpson Smith’s first novel is steeped in grief.... [The family's] losses are unrelenting; the act of merely keeping going seems almost heroic. From the start, Ms. Smith’s spare, rhythmic prose captivates.... Her refusal to serve up false redemption is admirable.
Carmela Ciuraru - New York Times
Smith has a real gift for describing both hope and despair, which is one of the hardest things for an author to do well. She’s also gifted at drawing realistic, three-dimensional characters, particularly Tabitha and her grandfather…Smith is absolutely a writer to watch.
NPR
Hypnotic…Smith employs a style of impressively measured, atmospheric understatement in her unabashedly stark descriptions, and we thrill to watch her characters row stoically into a darkening future.
Elle
With her preternaturally mature debut, Smith makes a persuasive bid to join the ranks of Hilary Mantel and Marilynne Robinson-people who have informed visions of history and the writing gifts to make them sing… Spartan, lyrical prose chimes in tune with austere times, wringing beauty from hard-bitten straits.
Independent Weekly
A luminous debut...
Oprah Magazine
Smith lyrically but firmly draws us still back in time to reveal the lives that surround her character…Transporting, tragic, both tranquil and turbulent, Smith captures life in any time period-but especially this era of newfound freedoms-with grace and powerful prose.
Interview Magazine
A bereaved father and his son-in-law struggle to understand the tragedies that have befallen them in Smith’s debut novel, which is set among the marshes of coastal North Carolina during the uncertain time of the American Revolution.... Smith’s soulful language of loss is almost biblical, and the descriptions of her characters’ sorrows are poetic and moving.
Publishers Weekly
Smith's spare prose and storytelling style is resonant of oral history or folk tales, and the early chapters...call to mind Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife. At first, this style creates something of a remove for the reader.... Despite the many sad events, the reader eventually engages, and the novel ends with a note of hope. —Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
Library Journal
[A] striking debut novel that reads like poetry and will linger like mythology, as Simpson’s language and metaphors weave threads of magic through each sentence.
BookPage
In her debut novel, Smith takes liberties with linear narrative and employs ever shifting points of view but still doesn't quite manage to imbue her stoic characters with inner lives.... Though Smith's homespun prose conveys a sense of the period without undo artifice, this is more a diorama of archetypes than a fully-fleshed drama.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The Story of Land and Sea is set during and after the Revolutionary War. Of what significance is the historical time and place of the story? How would you describe the town of Beaufort during this period? What are the particular challenges of this time especially for the lives of the novel's women?
How are these challenges demonstrated in the experiences of Helen, her daughter Tabitha, and her slave Moll? How do the lives of these eighteenth century women compare to those of women today? If you could go back in time and live during that period, would you?
2. Husbands lose wives, children lose mothers, and a mother loses her child in the novel. How do these losses affect each of them? How do each of the characters seem to cope—or not with his or her grief? Of all the profound experiences of loss and longing in the story, which was the most compelling to you?
3. Explain the significance of the title "The Story of Land and Sea." What does the contrast between the land and the sea bring to the novel? What do the sea and the land represent to each of the characters and how is each reflected in their lives?
4. Helen's "story of land and sea" comes in the form of trinkets—a brass bell, a broken pearl—she has gathered. Why are these small, everyday items so significant to her? What kind of treasures does her daughter Tabitha collect? Why do we collect objects—why are the important to us?
5. Tabitha, Helen's daughter, identifies the mother she never knew with the ocean. What specific human characteristics are suggested by the many and varied descriptions of the ocean throughout the novel?
6. For ten-year-old Tabitha, "the wicked are the heroes." Why? What is it about innocence and youth that might make such characters compelling? How would you describe Tabitha's childhood? In what ways is it unusual? We eventually come to know Tabitha's mother, Helen, as a child. Are mother and daughter alike? How is Tab both her mother's and her father's daughter?
7. Helen is a strong-minded woman, yet she is also a dutiful daughter who loves her father. Asa does not approve of John, yet Helen elopes with him anyway. What gives her the courage to defy her father and follow her heart? How does her sense of duty change over time?
8. Consider Helen's slave, Moll, who has been with Helen since both were young girls. Describe her relationship with Helen. Do they think of themselves as friends? Can a slave and a master truly be friends? How does the imbalance in their relationship affect how they see each other and how they experience the ordinary events of life, from marriage to childbirth? Though her life is held in bondage, in what ways does Moll demonstrate her power and independence? Of the two women, does one have more emotional power over the other?
9. After John's tragic loss, he decides to head west and takes Moll's son, Davy, with him. Why does he do this? Is he as heartless as Moll accuses of him of being? Shouldn't Moll be happy that going west holds the promise of eventual freedom for her son? What fuels her decision to run away, even though she is leaving two young daughters behind? Are you sympathetic to her choices? How does Asa respond to Moll's request for her freedom? Is it possible to sympathize with him?
10. Moll believes that "Love was weakness. Love was acknowledging the rightness of the world and this she could not do." Explain this. Why does she feel this way? What role does love play in each of the characters' lives? Is love a form of bondage or does it offer freedom? In thinking about Moll's marriage, Helen ponders a difficult question: What is a life without the ability to choose? How do you answer this?
11. Think about Helen. Miss Kingston a family friend, wishes the young woman had "a little imagination." What might she mean by this? Is her assessment of Helen correct? Of Helen it is said, "it's as well she kept herself from novels." Why? Can reading a novel be dangerous?
12. John grew up as a neglected orphan. How is he capable of such deep romantic and paternal love as an adult? Why are John and Helen drawn to each other? What does family mean to each of them? Compare and contrast John and Asa. How do their shared experiences and losses unite and divide them?
13. What is your opinion of Asa? He is a self-made businessman and a devout man. How does his business success and his faith sustain him? How do they fail him? How does losing the women he loves affect him? When John is leaving, Asa asks him if he will be lonely and gives him a shell. "Take it," he tells him. "You'll miss the sea." Why does he do this? Why does John later toss the shell away?
14. Consider the image of the blue martin momentarily trapped in Asa's house. What might it symbolize? How are the novel's themes—love, loss, sacrifice, duty, freedom, choice—demonstrated through various characters' experiences? Choose one or two themes and characters to explain.
15. Think about the structure of the novel. It begins in the present, goes back in time, then returns to the present. How does this structure add to the story's power? Why do you think the author chose to tell the story this way?
16. What did you take away from reading The Story of Land and Sea?
17. Think about the spiritual lives of the characters in this novel. How do the characters engage with both organized religion and personal faith? How do John and Asa respond differently after their wives die in childbirth? How do their religious beliefs change over time? Does Christianity look different to a slave owner like Helen and an enslaved person like Moll?
18. Part One ends in a tragic event. How does John cope with his losses in order to make a life for himself? How can we as readers also move on from that event? How do some of the characters maintain a sense of hope in their lives?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)