Book Review: A Reckoning by Linda Spalding

When an abolitionist stranger comes to town, he sets into motion a series of events. Bry, a runaway slave, heads for Canada in search of the family he was ripped away from, while the Dickenson family is forced to abandon their farm in Virginia in search of a new home across the American mid-west. The journey is fraught with… well, mostly danger, and it begins with a family rift. Told from various points of view and based on author Linda Spalding’s own family history, A Reckoning tells the story of slavery, of immigration, of colonial settlement, of familial estrangement, and of a burgeoning America just before the Civil War.

I read this book as part of a bookclub and did so without realizing it was a sequel to Spalding’s novel The Purchase, which won the Governor General’s Award for fiction in 2012. Had I known, it would have changed how I read the opening chapters. A lot of seemingly needless information was packed into the earliest part of this book—intergenerational histories, references to past events. In my ignorance, I wondered why the author felt it necessary to include it all. While interesting story nuggets in and of themselves, they weren’t pertinent to the story that ultimately unfolded throughout the rest of the novel. I suspect, knowing what I know now, these seemingly unrelated story nuggets were likely employed by the author to bridge the gap between novels. Looks like I have another book to read!!

Spalding’s novel deals with the formation of American cultural identity. As such, she handles difficult issues of colonial settlement and slavery with delicacy. Most of the novel is told from a white Euro-centric perspective—through the white gaze of the Dickensons. The other part is told from the point of view of Bry, an American born, enslaved black man. While the indigenous perspective is left out, the colonial reality is nevertheless addressed with subtly and respect.

“And so it was that my mother stood in the doorway of a small sod house, earned and yet never hers in the way of an ancient relationship to the land, while Bry’s mother stood in a doorway far from her starting place, picking up the broken pieces of the oldest relationship in the world.”

~ Spalding, p. 315

The prose in A Reckoning is exceptional. Spalding captures the tone and rhythm of 19th century speech patterns in the American south with ease, but it is also dense. Spalding expects a level of attention from her readers. Without it, some may lose the narrative’s throughline, as one bookclub attendee discovered. Still, the novel is all the richer for the author’s expansive writing. To quote Madeleine Thien’s book blurb as it appears on the back cover: “This is a beautiful and brilliant work of art…” 

A Reckoning by Linda Spalding McClelland & Stewart, 2017, p.p. 315 ISBN: 978-0-7710-9822-2