Chevalier tells a fierce, beautifully crafted story in At the Edge of the Orchard, her most graceful and richly imagined work yet. And a boy who decides to to marry a hooker just because she told him she was pregnant with his child knowing he doesn't love her and never will. The two youngest children, Robert and Martha, are the most sympathetic characters in the book and their futures are determined by one awful day in the orchard. Chevalier has carved out a middle-point between writing literary fiction and its page-turning, commerical counterpart and this book will serve both those audiences. Unimportant details - like the minute of apple grafting and redwoods vs sequoias - are given dozens and dozens of pages, while VERY important plot events are sped through on fast forward or only mentioned in a sentence or two.

I'm a little bit obsessed with stories that have some sort of forestry or agriculture in them and this one really ticked all of the right boxes for me. She has a BA in English from Oberlin College, Ohio and an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England. Actually, one of the characters Is THE Johnny Appleseed, rowing down the river in a double canoe filled with apple seedlings and saplings and apple seeds for homesteaders to plant. If they can nuture enough trees to satisfy the authorities, then they can claim the land, and James Goodenough's legacy will remain.

The novel starts out with alternating chapters of a husband and wife , having settled in Black Swamp, Ohio traveling west from Connecticut when they could go no further through the mud. Martha's rape by her own brother and her possible murder of him is given to us as 'he was mean to me' and with three sentences later. He lives a rootless, itinerant lifestyle, finally falling in with a British man who is employed collecting seeds and saplings to send back to England, where American plants - especially redwoods and sequoias - have become the rage on wealthy patrons' estates. Dysfunctional family, apple trees, apple jack, Hobbs a seed collector, the redwoods, sequoias, the gold rush, are some of the things touched on in this novel.

Its a struggle for any couple but made more difficult because Sadie is bitter and hates being on this patch of land and she is jealous of James' love for the orchard, especially, the "biters," fruit that is sweet and good for eating, vs. Chevalier does not hurry her revelations; the novel is almost halfway through before the buried secrets are even hinted at: “Robert had tried to lead an honest life, even when surrounded by dishonest people, but no matter how cleanly he lived now, he had made one mistake that he could never escape. James and Sadie Goodenough have settled where their wagon got stuck – in the muddy, stagnant swamps of northwest Ohio. Swamp Fever is rife and it is heartbreaking to hear James describe how he digs some graves before the undergrowth becomes too dense, for the children that he know will not make it through the season.James is stern and quick with his fists, he struggles with his inner thoughts, he knows that he feels affection for his children, especially Robert, but is unable to show kindness or love.