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Title: San Miguel
Author: T. C. Boyle
Narrator: Katherine Fenton
Format: Unabridged
Length: 17 hrs and 36 mins
Language: English
Release date: 10-15-12
Publisher: Audible Studios
Ratings: 1 of 5 out of 1 votes
Genres: Fiction, Historical
Publisher's Summary:
New Year's Day, 1888: It is the first day of Marantha Waters' new life on San Miguel. She has come with her husband, a Civil War veteran who has taken over the operation of the sheep ranch on the island. But this promised paradise proves to be a damp, wind-ravaged wasteland. As her husband grows increasingly distant from her and their adopted daughter Edith, Marantha's blighted lungs grow weaker.
March, 1930: Another family arrives on San Miguel. Elise Lester is a librarian from New York City; her husband Herbie, a World War I veteran full of manic energy. But the unyielding island is haunted by its history. Will the family be able to cling together as the war threatens to pull everything apart?
San Miguel is a vivid and gripping story of hard lives pitched against the elements, the desires of stubborn men and the unbearable burden of love, from master American storyteller T. C. Boyle.
Members Reviews:
San Miguel a new twist on classic Boyle
T.C. Boyle returns to the starkly beautiful landscape of his last novel, When the Killing's Done, in his newest work, San Miguel.
Don't look for the action-packed, bullet-paced prose of most of Boyle's earlier work, though. Boyle's novel, which is essentially the stories of the Waters and Lester families, explores the hauntingly elegiac mood and rhythms and, yes, boredom of life on an isolated island off the California coast.
Hardcore Boyle addicts looking for his stinging wit and humor may wonder when the story is going to begin. It really begins with the impending death of Marantha Waters whose husband's untimely affair with a trusted family servant and his decision to hold her daughter Edith in island servitude makes Marantha's end all the more tragic.
After several attempts to escape the island that has become her own private hell, during one of which when she yielded her virgin patent to an older man, Edith finally escapes.
As the Waters family saga ends, the story of the Lester family begins fifty years later during Prohibition. We're set amid the island's solitude along with Elise Lester and her husband Herbie. Life seems idyllic for the "Swiss Family Lester" as they are dubbed by the national media that tincture their poverty-stricken isolation with false romanticism.
The Swiss Family Lester veneer rubs through, though, with the advent of World War II, unwanted visitors and a tragic end that even idyllic Herbie could never have imagined.
The two family histories are joined by a single thread in the form of Jimmie, once gangling would-be paramour of Edith and later a used-up farmhand for the Lesters.
Based on actual family histories, this is a haunting novel that keeps us searching for relics of the fate of the Waters family even as the Lesters make a new life on the island.
The answer lies with San Miguel Island itself, rugged, stark, beautiful, and relentlessly unforgiving.
Story of an Island
San Miguel is the story of one of the Channel Islands off the coast of California. As I was raised in Carpinteria, I have found this generational story fascinating. Boyle weaves his narrative into his concern for the environment and how humans cause change in ecosystems without even realizing what they have done. This story examines the reasons why some are willing to live in isolation on a patch of turf in the middle of the sea and how that frontier changes them forever.
