Review: The Springsweet by Saundra Mitchell

The Springsweet by Saundra Mitchell
Pages: 275
Source: ARC from the publisher via AWTW Tours
Published: April 17, 2012 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Series or stand-alone: The Vespertine (2)
Rating: Squee-worthy
Further info/purchase: Goodreads | Barnes & Noble | Amazon
Find the author online: Twitter | Website


Heartbroken over the tragic death of her fiancé, seventeen-year-old Zora Stewart leaves Baltimore for the frontier town of West Glory, Oklahoma, to help her young widowed aunt keep her homestead going. 

There she discovers that she possesses the astonishing ability to sense water under the parched earth. When her aunt hires her out as a "springsweet” to advise other settlers where to dig their wells, Zora feels the burden of holding the key to something so essential to survival in this unforgiving land. 

Even more, she finds herself longing for love the way the prairie thirsts for water. Maybe, in the wildness of the territories, Zora can finally move beyond simply surviving and start living.

My Review

It's no secret that Saundra Mitchell's Gothic novel, The Vespertine was one of my favorite novels of 2011.  I'm a romantic at heart, and drawn to all kinds of anachronisms, and to me, The Vespertine was a book that, wonderfully, and amazingly, just didn't fit in, didn't quite belong amidst all the other young adult books I was reading, and that's a huge part of why I loved Saundra's book and her ethereal writing style quite so much.  I've recommended The Vespertine to so many people and talked extensively about it here, so when I received a copy of The Springsweet for an ARC tour, I was thrilled and elated, and I also had high hopes for the sequel to The Vespertine, it being Zora Stewart's story.  The Springsweet picks up right at a year after the events of The Vespertine, and it's not a lie to say that when I read the opening passages, I felt like I'd come home, back to Saundra's beautiful writing.

That I went a little mad, I cannot deny.  - Zora Stewart, page 1.  

With a beginning like that, I KNEW I was going to love The Springsweet, and I did definitely adore this novel.  As Zora flees Baltimore, and the reminder of the tragedies her family has suffered, she starts anew in the untamed West, and under Saundra Mitchell's pen, Oklahoma comes alive, a hot, dry, hard place that Zora nevertheless finds something elusive in: hope, and a rebirth of sorts when she discovers her ability to locate water underground, becoming a "springsweet."  This touch of the paranormal was very well-done, and flowed nicely with the rest of the story.  I immediately felt for Zora, who is Understandably broken and grieving, and fell for her all over again, for the spirit buried underneath her mourning.  Zora was changed vastly from the first book, but she still impressed me throughout The Springsweet with her heart and her ferocity.

I also fell for secondary character Emerson Birch, and one of Zora's two would-be suitors.  The second suitor, Theo de la Croix was a true gentleman, and although I found him to be very kind and sweet, it was Emerson I was drawn to: brave, unfettered Emerson.  I could see why Zora gravitated toward him, as well.  Saundra Mitchell certainly brought to life a man befitting the wild, feral Oklahoma, giving us just enough glimpses of Emerson, his abilities, and his heart to make him utterly irresistible.  I looked forward to Zora's interactions with him, and only wish we'd seen more of them together!

The Springsweet left me a little breathless with the beautiful scope of the story playing out, and Saundra's ability to so easily draw me in to the story she's telling.  Page after page, I was astounded at the grace spilling from the pages, and my ONLY complaint is that the story wasn't long enough!  I wanted and needed more - more time with Zora, and with Emerson, and even with Birdie, who was a wonderfully developed character.  I couldn't help it - I LOVED what I was reading and I quite desperately didn't want The Springsweet to end.  However it DID end...and on an amazingly heart-pounding cliff-hanger that left me grasping at the pages, and already looking forward to the third and final book in this series, Aetherborne.  I'm going to hate the wait, but I have EVERY bit of faith that it will be worth it!

Review: The Vespertine by Saundra Mitchell

The Vespertine by Saundra Mitchell

Published: 03.07.2011 (Harcourt Children's Books)

Pages: 293 (Hardcover)

Series: The Vespertine (1)

Rating: 4 1/2 of 5 stars

Further info: Goodreads | Amazon

Find the author online: site | blog | twitter

 The summer of 1889 is the one between childhood and womanhood for Amelia van den Broek - and thankfully, she’s not spending it at home in rural Maine. She’s been sent to Baltimore to stay with her stylish cousin, Zora, who will show her all the pleasures of city life and help her find a suitable man to marry.

Archery in the park, dazzling balls and hints of forbidden romance-Victorian Baltimore is more exciting than Amelia imagined. But her gaiety is interrupted by disturbing, dreamlike visions she has only at sunset - visions that offer glimpses of the future. Soon, friends and strangers alike call on Amelia to hear her prophecies. Newly dubbed “Maine’s Own Mystic”, Amelia is suddenly quite in demand.

However, her attraction to Nathaniel, an artist who is decidedly outside of Zora’s circle, threatens the new life Amelia is building in Baltimore. This enigmatic young man is keeping secrets of his own- still, Amelia finds herself irrepressibly drawn to him. And while she has no trouble seeing the futures of others, she cannot predict whether Nathaniel will remain in hers.

When one of her darkest visions comes to pass, Amelia’s world is thrown into chaos. And those around her begin to wonder if she’s not the seer of dark portents, but the cause.

 

My Review

"I woke in Oakhaven, entirely ruined."

I normally do not include first sentences, or passages from the novel other than to throw in one quote that stuck with me as I read.  But when it comes to Saundra Mitchell's The Vespertine, I have a feeling I am going to be talking a lot about the lyrical, poetic feel to this heart-wrenching and gorgeous novel.   From the captivating first sentence, to the breath-taking last sentence, until I closed the book, the words stayed with me.  When I was not reading this book, I was thinking about it, and longing to read just a few pages, to get back to the mythos Saundra created.  I have read a few reviews where readers had a difficult time getting in to this book, perhaps because of the setting, but I thought that was well-researched and well-fleshed out, and again, the language and the prose was just beautiful.

Amelia Van den Broek comes to Baltimore with a mission: to make a proper match.  I liked her immensely, and right away, though, because Amelia, our headstrong protagonist, immediately falls for a Fourteenth: someone just outside the right circles, who is paid to round out the number of guests at a dinner party.  Amelia and Nathaniel Hawthorne circle one another headily throughout this book, in a way that utterly enchanted me, and at times, took my breath away.  Their relationship was, for me, the biggest draw to the The Vespertine - their instant, irrevocable connection, and the way Saundra Mitchell explored it.  It wasn't love at first sight, but it was interest and fascination at first sight.  Nathaniel is forbidden; Amelia absolutely cannot marry him.  That was part of their mutual attraction, but the other part was that these two characters shared something unbreakable and, in my opinion, were absolutely right for one another.  The depth of their tenderness toward one another, in spite of some highly tense and breathless chase scenes, really rang true for me.  It's not a game for either of them.  I found them incredibly believable as a possible couple, even though in the sense that this book is a historical novel, "couple" isn't even the right term, not for what they were to one another.

I was also a huge, huge fan of the plot.  By the synopsis's own admission, Amelia has visions, but what I loved so much was that they were woven into the story very well, and they were not the entire story.  There is a whole cast of delightful and spunky characters in The Vespertine, and they all weave into Amelia's sunset visions, which originate almost as an accident, then become a regular occurrence, as callers begin to pour into the home where Amelia is staying with her cousins.  The novel waltzes toward a climax, based on one of Amelia's visions, that does bring on the tragedy the synopsis hints at, in such a way that I was tearing through the pages to see what happened from that point on.

Another thing that greatly appealed to me was the few intervals in the present, where we saw a vastly changed Amelia.  The bulk of the story is told several months in the past, when most of the plot takes place, but the interludes with Amelia back home with her brother and her sister-in-law were particularly poignant, for this is Amelia after.  Shaken and bereft, we see her struggling to retain any sense of normalcy, and I thought those little breaks in the main plot were brilliantly done. 

I also want to applaud Saunda Mitchell on her development of her secondary characters.  There were several that I wish we had seen more of, but my favorite was Zora Stewart, Amelia's close-in-age cousin.  Zora is even spunkier than Amelia (who tries to cling to propriety sometimes) and I just fell for Zora.  I loved her side-plot, and by the end of the book, I wanted to see more with her (and it seems we will get to in the sequel, The Springsweet!)

The only reason that this is not a 5 star review is a simple one: I wish we had seen a little more info and back story on abilities like Amelia's, like where did she get hers?  She is not the only character in this book with "powers"...and I really really hope the sequel delves further into why those that do have them, do, what all they can do with them, etc.  It seemed like some of the abilities came out of nowhere.  Other than that...I loved The Vespertine, and will be swooning over it for a long time to come. 

Memorable Quote

The stars could have burned out around us, the moon could have fallen from the sky, and I wouldn't have known it. Not when he leaned indecently close and pressed his cheek against mine to murmur, "Tell me a secret."

I wanted him to tell me how he stopped time like that. How he read my mind. I wanted to admit I wondered if thoughts of me troubled him when he lay awake at night. But I could make none of that come to my lips....

Instead... I whispered back, "I've seen the future."

He didn't laugh. He didn't mock, not like he had done at Privalovna's performance. In the middle of our waltz, he stopped, nose to nose with me. He uncovered me with a look that somehow bared him, too.  And his question told me everything - that he stopped time because he needed me, that he read my mind because we were one. That I troubled his nights, indeed, because what he asked revealed it all.

"Am I with you there?"  - Amelia and Nathaniel