Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Clark, J. 2013 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stayton Public Library | CLARK | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A gothic, literary adventure set in New England, Janice Clark's haunting debut chronicles one hundred years of a once prosperous and now crumbling whaling family, told by its last surviving member.
Mercy Rathbone, fifteen years old, is the diminutive scion of the Rathbone clan. Her father, the last in the beleaguered dynasty, has been lost at sea for seven years - ever since the last whale was seen off the coast of Naiwayonk, Connecticut. Mercy's memories of her father grow dimmer each day, and she spends most of her time in the attic hideaway of her reclusive uncle Mordecai, who teaches her the secrets of Greek history and nautical navigation through his collection of specimens and moldering books. But when a strange, violent visitor turns up one night, Mercy and Mordecai are forced to flee the crumbling mansion and set sail on a journey that will bring them deep into the haunted history of the Rathbone family, and the reasons for its undoing.
As Mercy and Mordecai sail from island to island off the Connecticut coast, encountering dangers and mysteries, friends and foes, they untangle the knots of the Rathbone story, discovering secrets long encased in memory. They learn the history of the family's founder and patriarch, Moses Rathbone, and the legendary empire he built of ships staffed with the sons of his many, many wives. Sons who stumbled in their father's shadow, distracted by the arrival of the Stark sisters, a trio of "golden" girls, whose mesmerizing beauty may have sparked the Rathbone's decline.
From the depths of the sea to the lonely heights of the widow's walk; from the wisdom of the worn Rathbone wives to the mysterious origins of a sinking island, Mercy and Mordecai's journey will bring them to places they never thought possible. But will they piece together a possible future from the mistakes of the past, or is the once great family's fate doomed to match that of the whales themselves?
Inspired by The Odyssey by way of Edgar Allan Poe and Moby Dick , The Rathbones is an ambitious, mythic, and courageous tour de force that marks the debut of a dazzling new literary voice.
Author Notes
Janice Clark is a writer and designer who lives in Chicago. She grew up in Mystic, Connecticut, land of whaling and pizza.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A teenager comes of age and grapples with the heavy burdens of family secrets against the backdrop of the 19th-century New England whaling industry in this beautifully written, playful, and intricate debut novel. Fifteen-year-old Mercy Rathbone's father, a whaler, has been away from home for nearly a decade, but Mercy holds out hope for his return. She happens to witness her mother coupling with a stranger, a scene that prompts Mercy and her cousin Mordecai to flee their home in panic. They embark on a journey of discovery that leads her to the truth about her missing brother and the rest of her family (the inclusion of several family trees with ever-spreading branches is a nice visual companion to the prose). Mercy's travels alternate with flashbacks depicting her ancestors, beginning in 1761, with Moses, the first Rathbone, who had the gift of spotting a whale before any sign of it was visible. Clark creates evocative descriptions (a whale's carcass is a "diminished hulk of patched black and rotted gray"), making her images and encounters between people especially vivid. Agent: Mollie Glick, Foundry Literary + Media. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Drawing on Edgar Allan Poe, Homer and Herman Melville, an ambitious saga of lineage and whaling in which Mercy and Mordecai Rathbone embark on a circular voyage in pursuit of their identities. Simultaneously mythic, gothic and whimsical, Clark's debut imagines the North American whaling industry through the lens of an eccentric, male-dominated dynasty springing from Moses Rathbone, discovered at sea in a barrel in 1761. With his combination of maritime skills and instinct, Moses systematically breeds a line of sons who will harvest untold numbers of sperm whales and generate enormous wealth. Wives are stolen and spurned, girl children mysteriously absent. But the arc of the Rathbone supremacy declines, as does the whale population, and by the time Mercy sets off in 1859 with her cousin Mordecai to look for Mercy's father and her mysterious twin brother, and also escape the man chasing her from Rathbone House, the family's history has begun to be covered by the sands of time. Clark imagines a rich hinterland to her briny story, yet the episodic foreground is desultory, with the cousins wandering among islands in the Atlantic, responding numbly to dark, sometimes opaque discoveries. Eventually returning to Rathbone House, Mercy excavates the last complicated layer of her family's bonds and bids several goodbyes and one hello. Chicago-based author Clark seduces with her vision and her prose but disappoints with non-epic storytelling.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Fleeing from a mysterious man in blue, 15-year-old Mercy Rathbone and her cousin, Mordecai, set off on a near-epic odyssey that will take them in search of the girl's whaler father, who has been missing for nine years, and for the twin brother she has never known. Set in the mid-nineteenth century, their journey traverses space and time, too, as numerous flashbacks fill in the history of the legendary Rathbone family. The Rathbone men seem to have an almost preternatural affinity for the sea and have made a fortune from whaling. But by the time the novel begins, the whales are gone, the family has almost completely died out, its mansion is crumbling, its fortune is dwindling. Will Mercy and Mordecai somehow manage to reverse the tide? There are hints here of Homer's Odyssey and, in the whale-obsessed father, of Melville's Moby-Dick. But, in larger part, the story seems to be a dark combination of fairy tale and fever dream, replete with reality-bending, dark secrets, and a fascinating, multigenerational family.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2010 Booklist