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Title details for The Rathbones by Janice Clark - Available

The Rathbones

by Janice Clark
Erin Spencer
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
A gothic, literary adventure set in New England, Janice Clark's haunting debut chronicles one hundred years of a once prosperous and now crumbling whaling family, told by its last surviving member.

Mercy Rathbone, fifteen years old, is the diminutive scion of the Rathbone clan. Her father, the last in the beleaguered dynasty, has been lost at sea for seven years - ever since the last whale was seen off the coast of Naiwayonk, Connecticut. Mercy's memories of her father grow dimmer each day, and she spends most of her time in the attic hideaway of her reclusive uncle Mordecai, who teaches her the secrets of Greek history and nautical navigation through his collection of specimens and moldering books. But when a strange, violent visitor turns up one night, Mercy and Mordecai are forced to flee the crumbling mansion and set sail on a journey that will bring them deep into the haunted history of the Rathbone family, and the reasons for its undoing.
As Mercy and Mordecai sail from island to island off the Connecticut coast, encountering dangers and mysteries, friends and foes, they untangle the knots of the Rathbone story, discovering secrets long encased in memory.  They learn the history of the family’s founder and patriarch, Moses Rathbone, and the legendary empire he built of ships staffed with the sons of his many, many wives. Sons who stumbled in their father’s shadow, distracted by the arrival of the Stark sisters, a trio of “golden” girls, whose mesmerizing beauty may have sparked the Rathbone’s decline.
From the depths of the sea to the lonely heights of the widow’s walk; from the wisdom of the worn Rathbone wives to the mysterious origins of a sinking island, Mercy and Mordecai’s journey will bring them to places they never thought possible.  But will they piece together a possible future from the mistakes of the past, or is the once great  family’s fate doomed to match that of the whales themselves?
Inspired by The Odyssey by way of Edgar Allan Poe and Moby Dick, The Rathbones is an ambitious, mythic, and courageous tour de force that marks the debut of a dazzling new literary voice.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 6, 2013

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780804148405
      • File size: 410170 KB
      • Duration: 14:14:31

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      The narrations for this mesmerizing literary sleightof-hand trick, which mimics ancient epics or folktales, are uneven. Mercy Rathbone is a young woman of the mid-nineteenth century, the last of a mythically strange New England whaling family. She is determined to learn who she is and what she has come from, and her quest drives the story, but Erin Spencer's diction is too contemporary for the piece, more "NYPD Blue" than MOBY-DICK. The other three narrators are perfectly cast and perform with admirable skill; whoever does the voice of Mercy's lost brother, Gideon, is either an actual 7-year-old boy with sensational acting skills, or a flat-out genius. Except for the one casting misstep, this is a marvelous production of a remarkable text. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 20, 2013
      A teenager comes of age and grapples with the heavy burdens of family secrets against the backdrop of the 19th-century New England whaling industry in this beautifully written, playful, and intricate debut novel. Fifteen-year-old Mercy Rathbone’s father, a whaler, has been away from home for nearly a decade, but Mercy holds out hope for his return. She happens to witness her mother coupling with a stranger, a scene that prompts Mercy and her cousin Mordecai to flee their home in panic. They embark on a journey of discovery that leads her to the truth about her missing brother and the rest of her family (the inclusion of several family trees with ever-spreading branches is a nice visual companion to the prose). Mercy’s travels alternate with flashbacks depicting her ancestors, beginning in 1761, with Moses, the first Rathbone, who had the gift of spotting a whale before any sign of it was visible. Clark creates evocative descriptions (a whale’s carcass is a “diminished hulk of patched black and rotted gray”), making her images and encounters between people especially vivid. Agent: Mollie Glick, Foundry Literary + Media.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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