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    The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel
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    The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel
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    The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel

    Written by Katy Simpson Smith

    Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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, 10-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 10th 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 lonely paths we travel in the name of renewal.

    A HarperAudio production.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateAug 26, 2014
    ISBN9780062350848
    Author

    Katy Simpson Smith

    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 has published a study of early American motherhood, We HaveRaised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750–1835. She lives in New Orleans.

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    Reviews for The Story of Land and Sea

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      I wouldn't consider this a story about the war at all, to me it was more about the characters and the relationships between them. I didn't love the ending, I felt I was left with a lot of questions and everything just drifted off. There was no real conclusion.
    • 4/5
      This story begins with vibrant 10-year-old Tabitha who lives on the North Carolina coast with her father John. Her mother died in childbirth, so she never knew her, but she and her father have a good life together. Tabitha is a daughter of the sea, having been raised with the stories her father has told of his days as a pirate. She dreams of traveling the seas herself, but her father keeps her safely ensconced on shore.After Tabitha comes down with yellow fever, her grandfather Asa draws close to the only thing left of his own daughter and his family, having lost his own wife in childbirth as well.This story leads to reminiscing and goes back into the past to show how we came to the present. We learn about John's deceased wife Helen, her life and how he won her heart. We learn of the friendship that had developed between Helen and her slave Moll, who was "given" to her as a gift on her tenth birthday. We see the tragedy of Moll's life, and how every hope and dream she has exists in her eldest child Davy.We witness a fresh start for John, and in the end of his life, Asa finds himself filled with regret for the things he has not done, and for his lack of kindness and consideration in his relationships.My final word: This is a well written story with well developed characters. It's a melancholy tale full of ghosts and haunting memories. Overall I liked it. The book is divided into three parts, and I found that the first part wound up being my least favorite. My fondness for the story grew as the story built, with Davy becoming probably my favorite character. In the end, I was left with the sea as the past and the land as the future-- and the future is full of hope and possibilities.
    • 3/5
      I found this book sad to the point of depressing from beginning to end. And speaking of the end...this is a novel with no resolution, whether good or bad, for the characters or the reader.
    • 2/5
      I knew I won't love this book when a certain character died fifty pages in and I was treated to a gruesome description of a body being preserved in a barrel of rum. Overall, the characters in this book seem haunted by death and loneliness, which made it a very sad read for me (I only finished because its a rather short novel).
    • 3/5
      I enjoy historical fiction, but I'm not sure that I enjoyed this one. The subject matter interested me, and it showed promise, but I found that I just didn't care what happened to the characters. The book may have been touted as a Revolutionary War novel, but that was a very small part of the book. The prose was nice, but the substance wasn't there. The characters weren't developed well, and too many things were left hanging. I can't say much more without giving away portions of the plot.
    • 4/5
      There are some books that are difficult to describe. They are notable for the feeling or impression they inspire in the reader. Katy Simpson Smith's The Story of Land and Sea is one of these books. When a bookstore owner and fellow reader friend of mine pressed the advanced copy of this book into my hands, she simply said, "This is set in North Carolina and you should read it." Normally she can discuss the heck out of why but this one seemed to stymie her. She just knew there was something about it that begged to be read even if she couldn't articulate that something. And she was right. And I find myself struggling to explain why I agree with her, but I certainly do. The novel opens in 1793 with ten year old motherless Tabitha (Tab) living in a coastal Carolina town with her father John, not too far from her grandfather, her mother's father, Asa. Tab has been allowed to run fairly wild without a mother to guide her. She is drawn to the sea and the ships that bob in the harbor. She explores tidal pools, swims out to a sandbar, and lazes in the sun. She asks her father for tales of his life with her mother, Helen, before she died in childbirth bringing forth Tab. That they eloped on a pirate ship and lived simply and happily until they had to come back to land and make a life for their coming child fascinates her no end. And these tales, hard as they are for John to articulate, are the only piece of her mother than Tab has. Although Tab is often unsupervised, she is precious to her father and she is the last of her grandfather's blood. When she's stricken with yellow fever, John and Asa disagree with how to save her. One trusting in God and the other a non-believer. In the end, John takes her onto a ship, the same way he took Helen so many years ago, desperate for the sea to work its magic on his small daughter. And then the novel jumps back in time to when Helen, a motherless young woman herself, lived alone with her father, Asa. She was certain of her faith, quite devout, and strove to teach the word of God to the local slaves, presiding over Sunday services for them. She had her own slave, Moll, gifted to her by her father when she was a small child herself, but with whom she had a rather strange and complicated relationship, by turns distant or intensely close, uncaring or needy. In the final year of the Revolutionary War, she meets John, a soldier posted in Beaufort and prefers him to the more acceptable suitor whom her father has chosen. And so begins the tale that Tab so loved to hear. The third part of the story returns to 1793, to John and Asa and to the slave Moll and her much adored son Davy. Moll has always loved Davy beyond the daughters who followed him and yet she has even less control over his destiny than John or Asa had over their daughters. Moll's love for Davy is desperate and deep despite the fact that she cannot keep him with her when John and Asa decide otherwise. And she is willing to risk all for love of him.Each of the three sections of the novel focuses on a parent and child, the connection between them, the overwhelming love, and the ways in which a parent does not, perhaps cannot, know his or her child's heart. In all three cases there is an trace, sometimes faint and others times not so faint, of a possessiveness about that love, a feeling that the child belongs to the parent. And yet life proves this possessiveness to be ephemeral in all cases. The characters here are almost all adrift in life without a real course. They seem solitary even in their connections with each other. The writing is rich, beautiful, and fluid and the general feel of the novel is elegant, dreamy, and haunting right from the start. It is an overwhelmingly sad story of loss after loss and melancholy threads through all three parts of the tale. The three parts are not arranged chronologically, allowing Smith to use the middle portion of her triptych as a respite from the unexpected plot trajectory of the first part, allowing the reader to process that deliberate authorial choice before moving forward with the tale. An elegiac, lyrical story, it will hover in your consciousness a long time after you close the cover.
    • 4/5
      The Story of Land and Sea follows two generations of fathers and daughters and a mother and son. Asa is a small turpentine plantation owner who is raising a young daughter, Helen, by himself. Helen is strong willed, independent and devout. For Helen's tenth birthday, she is given a young slave, Moll, Helen and Moll have a push and pull relationship as they grow up together. Moll is married off young and in short succession gives birth to a son, Davy, who is the only true love of her life. Helen believes she won't find love, but falls for a former pirate and soldier, John. John and Helen steal away on a ship where she becomes pregnant. Years later, John is a single father to a rambunctious ten year old girl, Tabitha. When Tabitha becomes ill, John believes the sea will be her salvation. A moving story of love, loss and moving on set in North Carolina around the time of the American Revolution. Written with beautiful prose, the effects of death and loss for parents is explored. This story is not told chronologically, but that doesn't matter. The story begins with John and Tabitha, the focus is on their relationship. At first, I thought that I was having a really hard time finding Tabitha's character and relating to her, but then I realized that is not the focus. I did find it easy to feel John's overwhelming love and devotion to his daughter and the memory of his wife and that he was willing to do whatever necessary for her. The story then moves to Helen as a young child where her relationship with her father is explored. Helen and her father's relationship changes as Helen grows and finds her own relationship with John. This was one of the best parts of the book for me, seeing their relationship grow. The third part of the book focuses on Asa and John's relationship after they both have dealt with significant loss. The tension of their dislike for one another is great but their similarities in grief and love for Helen and Tabitha binds them. Moll and her son Davy are also an important focus, Moll faces a different kind of loss, although significant in her life. Although, the loss of Davy is definitely one that is bittersweet. This is not a happy read, although it is an emotional story of struggle, loneliness and love.This book was received for free in return for an honest review.
    • 4/5
      The grief, besides, has waned to washes of melancholy, impressions connected to no specific hurt but to the awareness of a constant. He is in no pain but the pain of the living. Page 15Asa and John are different men but are connected by the women in their lives and what fate has doled out to each in equal measure. Both men have loved and lost. Both have suffered grief, the bone deep, earth shattering heartbreak of losing spouse and daughter. There are no answers, no consolation except the passage of time and the hope that life will continue to ebb and flow, unchanging like the tides against the shore, unending. The Story of Land and Sea contains flashes of brilliance hidden amidst a contemplative story about family and generations of fathers and daughters. The first half the book doesn't quite pack the punch that pervades the latter half of the book. As the story slowly builds and the characters are fleshed out, Smith demonstrates that she has an ability to write about people and the extraordinary ways love and loss are deeply imbedded in our daily living. The connection between Asa, the father in law and John the son in law is intriguing and although the story cannot be described as a page turner, it is definitely a slow burner that draws you in. At it's core is a story that is unassuming, but still memorable. Recommended.
    • 5/5
      Sometimes you find an author who writes in such a way that you are no longer reading but rather experiencing the story. Katy Simpson Smith in her debut, The Story of Land and Sea had that magic pen. I picked up the book and from the first page I found myself immersed in the world that Ms. Smith was creating. It was not a happy world in a lot of ways as the story revolves around love and loss.The novel starts in 1793 in Beaufort, S.C., with a father and his daughter. His wife died in childbirth and he remembers their freedom as they sailed as privateers. She married against her father Asa's will for love and her father never forgave her or her husband but he did love his granddaughter. In her he saw the hope for the future he lost when his daughter died. But Tabitha does not want to be a lady of the manor any more than her mother Helen did.A crisis strikes leading Tabitha and her father John to a hasty decision that will alienate them from Asa and cause a spiral down for all. Also involved in the story is Moll, a slave given to Helen as a 10th birthday present.This is not a book that deals with easy themes and it does not spare the reader on emotions but the writing is so good that you just float along on the tide of the story. I found my self crying more than once and it's been a long time since a book impacted me in that way. I forgot I was reading - it was not an easy read but it was so very easy to read. I'll be keeping this one to read again and I suspect it will become a favorite despite the sorrow.
    • 4/5
      THE STORY OF LAND AND SEA is beautifully written with exquisite prose. The main character is Helen whose story is told before and after her death along with the tale of her husband, her father, her daughter, and Moll, a slave from the plantation and Helen's friend.You will follow the characters through their lives on a plantation, on a ship, and in a regular household. The characters are an odd sort but ones with depth and with feelings that ooze through the pages simply because of Ms. Smith’s elegant writing style. THE STORY OF LAND AND SEA takes the reader through complex situations with the reader being put directly into the story and being carried along with the characters and feeling every emotion especially their pain of loss. I was a bit confused at first, but Ms. Smith writes so beautifully and so poignantly that you can't help but want to continue. THE STORY OF LAND AND SEA is a book unlike any other I have read simply because of the storyline and the time in history.The confusion came about because of the time frame and order of dates. The book moves back and forth from past to present day in Helen and John's life but seemed to be out of order.Despite the confusion, the book definitely will keep your interest and will keep you reading. Ms. Smith has written a thoughtful book in a time period that I wasn't familiar with and therefore made THE STORY OF LAND AND SEA even more intriguing and interesting.I would recommend this book solely on the premise of the marvelous writing style Ms. Smith has and the background she gave as to why she wrote the book. The beauty of the reason Ms. Smith wrote the book makes THE STORY OF LAND AND SEA a stunning debut. 4/5 (See her video below)This book was given to me free of charge and without compensation by the publisher in return for an honest review.
    • 3/5
      The book is an easy read, although the timeline and tale move back and forth when one or another character is highlighted and it sometimes caused confusion, but as the story continued, it soon became clearer. The important characters are Asa, Helen, John, Tabitha and Moll. Asa seemed to be a bitter, unhappy man, suffering from the loss of his wife in childbirth, a wife whose value he didn’t realize until she was gone. Although, his wife was devout, he was not, until his daughter, Helen, was rescued after she was captured by the British. As a rule, he was very disciplined and rigid, but he adored Helen and doted on her, allowing her more privileges than most women of her day because there were no women in her life to really teach her, her proper place in the world. He considered himself to be a just slave holder who provided well for them. I thought Asa had a fatal flaw; he only realized the error of his ways after he made the errors, but he never learned from them.Helen was a devoted daughter who looked after her father’s affairs and did not express a desire to marry, rejecting all suitors until John appeared on the scene. She had been completely devoted to the farm and her father, and her father had come to accept her wishes not to marry, and he actually believed this would be the best course of action for them. They would live together, and she would handle all of his needs while he traveled and did work for the government during the days of the Revolutionary War.John is a man with no status, no fortune or family to speak of, but he adores Helen from the first moment he spies her. He keeps his feelings silent because he is rooming in a friend’s home and his friend is courting her according to the wishes of Helen’s father and her unwanted beau’s mother. John, a soldier, was previously a pirate. He was not exactly equal in station to Helen and had no way to truly provide for her. Still, love blossomed, and although Asa disapproved of the man who rescued his daughter, they found their own way to happiness.Tabitha is a fun loving, happy child doomed to be motherless. Helen’s mother had died in childbirth, and her fate was the same. Tabitha became the shining light of her father’s eye, as Helen had been the raison d’etre for Asa. Tabitha contracted Yellow Fever and died at the age of 10. Asa, the grandfather and John, the father both suffered the same terrible losses, both eventually lost wife and child. Moll was a slave given to Helen for Helen’s tenth birthday. Moll was eleven and not quite aware of her place as a slave, yet always aware that she was owned and not free. She wanted her freedom and that wish remained with her. Her relationship with the family, Helen, Asa and even John, was one that was not clearly defined as slave and master since there were times she was treated warmly and kindly, but in the end, they did with her as they pleased, never truly considering her feelings, only considering their own, thinking of her as a lesser being, never realizing that she hurt as they hurt. When she was forced to marry and had her own children, they never worried about separating her from her loved ones, although they never stopped mourning for those they lost. The relationships between John and Helen, Asa and his wife, and Moll and Moses had distinctive beginnings, and each was different in its nature. The degree of love and affection varied as did the loyalty. All three couples had children and were devoted to them, though in Moll’s case, not to all equally. We are introduced to John and Tabitha, in 1793, in a town on the coast of North Carolina, a storm is raging, and a young child, Tabitha, is listening to a tale her father is telling her about her mother, a woman she never met. Her parents had run away together, against Helen’s father’s wishes and spent a year at sea. Asa did not want his daughter, Helen, to marry a man, John, beneath her status, a man with no family or fortune to speak of, or perhaps Asa did not want her to marry at all, so they eloped, but this is not the story John tells his daughter, instead he weaves truth and fantasy into other tales to entertain her. John has a store in which he sold sundries like eggs, candy, yarn, ribbons and flour. During the day, Tabitha had great freedom, as Helen did as a child. She wandered the shoreline and collected mementos of land and sea, as her mother before her did. There are many parallel stories in this tale. Helen and Tabitha both lost their mothers in childbirth. Moll, John and Asa all lose a child in one way or another. Each perceives freedom differently, but each desires it. Although John and Asa are suffering from their own sorrows, they do not understand that Moll suffers as well. The sea figures in all of their lives. John believed nothing bad could happen on the sea, Asa believed it relaxed him in his old age, although previously he thought the land was a far better place to be, and Moll believed it was her ticket to freedom. John sees Helen in Tabitha as Asa sees both his wife and his daughter in her.The dichotomy between the lives of the two children, Moll and Helen, is apparent to the reader, but not to Helen. She accepts that Moll should have less freedom and feels little guilt when she forces her to do things that are abhorrent to Moll. She believes it is simply the way it is and addresses Moll as if she can do the same things as Helen, even though her own behavior often prevents Moll from being as free. Their friendship is unusual, but not fully formed.At the end, I thought the sea brought Helen and John together, even as it separated her from Asa, and I wondered if its course, perhaps, would provide a path for Moll to freedom, since she was separated from her best loved son Davey, but then I wondered if it would also be the watery grave for Asa, who was a sad, lonely old man at the end of his life, separated from all those he loved.
    • 3/5
      This story takes place between 1771 and 1794 in the small coastal town of Beaufort, North Carolina. It chronicles the very harsh lives of three generations beginning with Tabitha, the granddaughter, and going back in time to Helen the mother, and Asa, the grandfather. Helen’s slave Moll also figures in the narrative.The story is bleak, and what little bits of hope the characters occasionally have pretty much always get dashed. At the end, it doesn’t even end. And the takeaway? There isn’t any, as far as I could see. Other reviewers were impressed by the writing, but for me, writing needs to take me somewhere. This book seemed less like a coherent story and more like a series of set pieces about bad lives in rough times.Evaluation: While I didn’t get much out of this relatively short novel, for a different viewpoint be sure to check the other mostly positive reviews elsewhere.
    • 3/5
      Occasionally, I read a book that even after a day or two of reflection I am still not sure what I feel about the book and I am thus stumped when someone asks me how I would rate this book (and not liking to rank a book as I believe most books are much more than their ratings).I was interested to read this book for several reasons; I enjoy historical fiction, North Carolina (the setting for the book) is now my new home state so enjoying learning the history of the area, and the author has written a history book.I enjoyed how the author was able to take me to a particular place and time – the waning days of the American Revolutionary War set in a small prospering coastal town in North Carolina whose growth will be spurred by the growing town of New Bern. The book informs and reminds how challenging childbirth was in the past, often with the mother not surviving and how this changed the dynamics of childrearing. While I had no issues with the lyrical yet taut language it did not invest me in the characters. The story format also contributed to my often lack of interest in the characters as the first part told me a little too much of what to expect for the rest of the book.Themes of duty, devotion, free will and self-blame are well played out and the self-rationalization of the characters show-off that human nature is the same across time. For many in current times, slavery has one face but the author shows us slavery in time as it was evolving into the formal institution that defined the United States and those that were enslaved did not believe the “hype” that sometimes cane from the “caring” slaveholders. Overall, this book added to my knowledge of time and place despite my lack of connection to the characters.