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2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
everything yet also loving some of what she hates” (145). The angel, the Minotaur, and the long-dead Moss are other figures that serve as guides as Cynthia navigates the maze. These guides, on one hand, link back to ideas about wonder, imagination, and inspiration found in “The Gatehouse,” further opening Cynthia’s artistic mind. However, as Cynthia scrambles to find her way out of this altered dimension and solve the mystery of Moss, her guides also raise questions about how much darkness it takes to turn a person into a living ghost or to contaminate a soul. For Glimmerglass, the magical and fantastic elements are only another facet of the real, highlighting important ideas and questions about everything from wonder and imagination to passion to the things that haunt a person and those that make a person come alive. Cynthia’s journey is an awakening, proving that life is not over at “middleage,” but rather a chance for a new beginning. And, at the heart of the novel is the illustration of how people can navigate the ghosts and find their way without losing pieces of their self. n
IN “THE SPACES BETWEEN KNOWING AND NOT KNOWING” a review by Cheryl Dudasik-Wiggs Katy Simpson Smith. The Story of Land and Sea. New York: HarperCollins, 2015.
CHERYL DUDASIK-WIGGS is a native North Carolinian who makes her home in New Bern, an hour’s drive northwest of Beaufort. She teaches in the Department of English at ECU where she directed the Women’s Studies program for ten years. KATY SIMPSON SMITH, a native of Jackson, MS, earned a PhD in history from UNC Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA, and is also the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750–1835 (Louisiana State University Press, 2013).
Sorrow permeates the pages of Katy Simpson Smith’s The Story of Land and Sea like a Southern mist, hope and regret battling to co-exist in the small coastal town of Beaufort, NC. Set a decade after the end of the Revolutionary War, the story weaves together the lives of three generations of a family torn apart not by war but by love. “Tell me something again” (14), begs young Tabitha as she and her father, John, stand at the sound’s edge. He obliges by sharing stories of her mother, Helen, the woman whose presence – in memory – is at the center of Smith’s premiere novel. John and Helen had eloped eleven years earlier against the wishes of her father, Asa, and had then spent a year sailing on a pirate ship where Tabitha was conceived. They returned to land in order to create a home, but the pull of the sea was and is ever present. After Helen dies in childbirth, Asa, a plantation master whose own wife died in childbirth, looks to God to be his personal avenger against John. When that revenge does not materialize, Asa becomes “one of those men who comes to church to punish himself, though of course there is pleasure in this penance” (10). Asa buries his daughter in consecrated ground and insists on taking Tabitha to weekly chapel even as he questions whether he – and his wild, heathen granddaughter – are worthy of Christian grace. There exists an uneasy truce between Asa and his son-in-law. A seaman by trade and by passion, John had served in the Continental Army and as a privateer before settling on land to become a respectable merchant. He is America’s future – adventurous, restless – while the devout, often distant Asa clings to a past that is untenable, learning too late how to love. And when Tabitha falls ill with yellow fever on her tenth