At the Edge of the Orchard

Published Nov. 8, 2016 by Viking.

ISBN:: 978-0-525-95300-5

(1 review)

James Goodenough, whose family had originally settled in Connecticut from England brings his family to Ohio to carve out a new life for them in the Black Swamp in 1838. As swamp fever gradually picks off their children and they wrestle daily with survival. This course will see their family engulfed in tragedy and fifteen years later we pick up with their youngest son, Robert who has been running west since the trying to escape his memories of what happened, taking solace in a very different kind of tree--the redwoods and sequoias of California. But Robert's past catches up with him and he's forced to confront what he's running from and work out for himself that you can't run for ever.

10 editions

Marya reviewed At the Edge of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier

Review of 'At the Edge of the Orchard' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This book suffered a little from my recent reading of an even more ebulliently tree-infused book (The Overstory) but it's very engaging. Portrait of a truly awful marriage surviving somehow on the frontier in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the chosen bone of contention being the contents of the apple orchard, and how both the tree-madness and the misery fall to the next generation. It was influenced by Michael Pollan's writing about Johnny Appleseed, and he is a minor character, but he never takes over the novel which is its own thing, just what I like in a historical novel.