For most of her eighty-one years, Margaret Cape has been watching and waiting for the signposts that will tell her what to do, to find the story of her life that her father promised her. One was surely Big John Cape, a wealthy Southern plantation owner many years her senior. In him Margaret found her first guide, and Margaret Finley of Baldwin, Massachusetts, became Margaret Cape of Cape Plantation in Rosamond, Mississippi. When Big John dies, she is left childless and alone. Rosamond distrusts her quiet disregard of its traditions and wonders at her marriage, only a few years later, to Big John's son. Isolated on the immense plantation, Margaret invests her future in her firstborn son, John Buie III, teaching him to disregard the social and racial rules that Rosamond and the Capes cling to so steadfastly. One day, however, John Buie III is killed, and that same day his father falls to his death, and that same day Margaret stops speaking, stops thinking, almost stops existing. Twenty-seven years later Margaret's second son is dead, and even in her wide-eyed sleep, she knows the Cape Plantation must be returned to its rightful owner. Redolent with the sights and smells of Mississippi Delta and heavily with the atmosphere of its society, Margaret Cape knits toghether the South's evolution with Margaret's determination to remain whole and independent.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
First novelist Dunbar examines 60 years of political and social change in the Old South through her portrait of Margaret Cape, who seeks the meaning of her life by unraveling the story behind Cape Plantation, her large home in Rasamond, Mississippi. A Boston Yankee, Margaret married the much-older John Cape, who brought her to Cape Plantation, and after her husband's death married her stepson, with whom she bore two sons. She's buried them all. After years of silence induced by the shock of multiple deaths, she emerges to realize that time is running out. Obsessed with returning Cape Plantation to its rightful heirs, Margaret reconstructs her "story" in order to understand God's plan for her and for the plantaion. This gentle tale is told in a slow, measured cadence that skips around chronologically, much like an old person's memories. Recommended for popular collections.?Ellen R. Cohen, Rockville, Md.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A woman (a Yankee, no less) finds her destiny in the Mississippi Delta in a first novel that, despite its ambitions, comes across as a good ol' southern tale of family secrets, racial clashes, and steel magnolia women. From childhood, Margaret Cape has been told that she has a ``story of her own.'' Her father, a Massachusetts doctor, assures her that the story will be revealed only ``if she learn[s] to seek it.'' Margaret spends the rest of her life looking for signs that she's on the right track, first in her native New England, later in Mississippi. The narrative is told in sections that move back and forth between her past and the months following the fatal fall of Margaret's son, 43-year-old Chapin Finley Cape. This fall not only precipitates a search for missing wills by relatives and developers who have designs on Rosamond, the ancestral plantation that belongs to Margaret, but awakens her from the catatonic state into which she'd slipped in 1966. Margaret, a nurse, had fallen in love with the much-older Big John Cape, who'd come north in 1937 for treatment of what he thought was a fatal disease. He lived, but his wife died, and Margaret, entranced with his stories of the Cape family and Rosamond, soon accepted Big John's proposal and settled on the family plantation. When Big John dies, Margaret marries his son, the rough, violent John Buie, and has two sons (Buie and Chapin) of her own. By the 1960s, racial change is roiling Mississippi, and her beloved son Buie--in love with Caraly, his black childhood friend--pays a terrible penalty for marrying her. John Buie dies on the same day as his son, and Margaret becomes catatonic. When justice is finally served, after documents are found hidden in the decaying Rosamond, the now-awakened Margaret's story is complete. Shades of Grisham, Percy, and Welty, in a story that tries too hard to be too much. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointed,
By
This review is from: Margaret Cape: A Novel (Hardcover)
Having read the other reviewer comments, I am disappointed in this novel. I have not finished it yet and I am dragging myself through the story as if I were the 85 year old title character.In addition to finding the pace of the story to be slow, I find the use of time to be inconsistent. There is an obvious juxtaposition of time periods in the story, which is fine, but within the main time period shifts, there are also slippages between time periods that I find annoying. There are sentence structures that I find difficult to follow, perhaps because I did not grow up in the South. I may do this story an injustice by reading it while I am commuting by train but I am on page 229 of 344 pages, and I am still waiting for the story to catch my interest.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Move over John Grisham!,
This review is from: Margaret Cape: A Novel (Hardcover)
I was haunted by the main character Margaret Cape. As a southerner reading a story set in the south, every word was believable and real to me. I don't understand why Wylene Dunbar was not heralded and made famous by this novel. She is as good a story teller as Grisham, Welty and other Mississippi authors who already have their fame! Books like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and many by Anne Rivers Siddons came to mind when I read this intriguing tale.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Winner, 1998 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters award,
By A Customer
This review is from: Margaret Cape: A Novel (Hardcover)
This is a wonderful book, so it came as no surprise that MARGARET CAPE received this year's Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters fiction award, beating out nine other nominated books by top novelists in a state known for its writers. In his note describing Dunbar's award, Bob Summer (southern correspondent, Publishers Weekly) said that "[Dunbar's] stellar achievement is piercing the inner life of a searingly memorable woman in prose often simmering with sheer beauty."
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