I am not going to recount the plot, or dwell on the individual characters other than to say that I found them well drawn and convincing and that after my early misgivings, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. There are so many things that happen throughout the course of the story that are tragic or sad or just plain awful. Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published. What fascinates me most about Tracy Chevalier and her writing is the fact that in every one of her books I've been introduced to a subject, or a place that I knew nothing about before.

This time her settlers are first- and second-generation Americans making the no less arduous journey across the continent, from the east coast via Ohio to California in the wake of the gold rush. I think this is more a case of Chevalier's individual style rather than necessarily a flaw in her writing but it does require a certain amount of patience from the reader and an ability to just be swept along with the plot and trust that all will come together eventually. The desperate struggle of the early settlers was convincingly portrayed, and the wide sweep of frontier history, incorporating ranches, the gold rush and the constant movement across the vast, largely empty continent was very illuminating. As well as this desolate Ohioan setting, we experience the excitement and wonder of Gold Rush California when, Robert, the Goodenoughs’ youngest son heads West but don’t expect a sudden reversal of fortune for the Goodenough offspring!The entrepreneurial American Pioneer is discovering an income stream amid the country's newly discovered natural magnificence – the groves of wondrous trees are the new cash-cow, now that the Goldrush is running dry, and once again, Chevalier seems to be drawing our eye to the corruption in the original ideals of American progress – the pioneer spirit asserting itself over a natural world that might remain beautiful, if simply left alone. Ohio’s Black Swamp is inhospitable to humans, animals, crops and trees alike, and at the opening of the novel in 1838, the Goodenough family have been battling for nine years to grow the requisite 50 trees that will secure their claim to their land.

We know that family members are all different in size, shape, personality, and these are no different. The pressures of poverty, illness and the grind of working land that was never meant to be farmed are intensified by the simmering hostility between James and Sadie Goodenough, a couple whose manifest unsuitability is played out in the divisions of their orchard between “spitters” (for making cider and applejack) and “eaters”, and in the loyalties they command among their children. But it was also full of real characters just coping the best they could with all that life shot at them. James is a gentle grower of apple trees; Sadie, harder-edged, is a maker of cider and drinks far too much of it.It was fun to go to the internet and read about the people (John Chapman aka Johnny Appleseed, for one) and the places in this book. Robert’s doubts about the rush to commercialise California’s natural resources, turning the giant redwoods and sequoias into tourist attractions and exporting them to wealthy English landowners, echo the arguments between his father and the intinerant tree seller John Chapman (better known to history as Johnny Appleseed), about how far man should interfere with nature – a theme with obvious contemporary resonance. James and Sadie Goodenough have settled where their wagon got stuck - in the muddy, stagnant swamps of northwest Ohio.

James is obsessed with his apple trees and wants nothing more than to see his orchard thrive; Sadie wants nothing more than for the orchard to fail. The novel is a collage of voices and narrative perspectives that skips back and forth in time over the course of two decades, filling in details piece by piece, leapfrogging the book’s pivotal incident while teasingly hinting at it, so that only late in the book do we discover what actually happened in the orchard, and why Robert Goodenough, James and Sadie’s youngest son, has spent his adult life running westwards. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

While Robert isn't always a completely engaging character, his story is interesting and the people with which he surrounds himself is equally of importance. It is past pain that binds them in love, and this portrait of the tenderness of sibling love is in some ways Chevalier's greatest achievement. After a violent tragedy, the book skips forward in years, and follows the young son of the Goodenough family, Robert, who, we quickly learn, left his family behind and hasn't heard from any of them for decades. Robert's is of the archetypal cowboy, bent on his journey of rugged individualism to leave all that is bad, and making good simply by going west.