This Other Eden

All are rendered humble, human, particular and radiant in Harding’s long, poetic sentences … started to tense, weary of wading deeper into this story that I knew must end in violence and displacement for its indigent, Black cast … Yet the passages that put me on guard are the same ones that disarmed me. Harding’s prose is mesmerizing … Whatever apprehensions I had were outweighed by Harding’s powerful music … Despite Harding’s lush prose, there is a curiosity to these characters, to this world: Until their foreshadowed displacement, it seems the residents of Apple Island move about with little to no awareness of the racial politics of their day … This novel could be more focused on the turbulence of their eugenics-fueled expulsion, but instead we’re offered moments of family, connection and resilience, which only make the instances of violence and extrication more unsettling and explosive. With the fall of this Eden looming in the wings of the novel, what a careful and caring choice to spend so much time in the grandeur of the lives of the banished … Not without complication, not without terror, This Other Eden is ultimately a testament of love: love of kin, love of nature, love of art, love of self, love of home. Harding has written a novel out of poetry and sunlight, violent history and tender remembering. The humans he has created are, thankfully, not flattened into props and gimmicks, which sometimes happens when writers work across time and difference; instead they pulse with aliveness, dreamlike but concrete, so real it could make you weep.

Read Full Review >>