The Orphanmaster [Hardcover]

Jean Zimmerman (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 19, 2012

From a debut novelist, a gripping historical thriller and rousing love story set in seventeenth-century Manhattan

It’s 1663 in the tiny, hardscrabble Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, now present-day southern Manhattan. Orphan children are going missing, and among those looking into the mysterious state of affairs are a quick-witted twenty-two-year-old trader, Blandine von Couvering, herself an orphan, and a dashing British spy named Edward Drummond.

Suspects abound, including the governor’s wealthy nephew, a green-eyed aristocrat with decadent tastes; an Algonquin trapper who may be possessed by a demon that turns people into cannibals; and the colony’s own corrupt and conflicted orphanmaster. Both the search for the killer and Edward and Blandine’s newfound romance are endangered, however, when Blandine is accused of being a witch and Edward is sentenced to hang for espionage. Meanwhile, war looms as the English king plans to wrest control of the colony.

Jean Zimmerman brings New Amsterdam and its surrounding wilderness alive for modern-day readers with exacting period detail. Lively, fast paced, and full of colorful characters, The Orphanmaster is a dramatic page-turner that will appeal to fans of Hilary Mantel and Geraldine Brooks.

Editorial Reviews

Review

 
Praise for The Orphanmaster:

 

“The Orphanmaster is a sweeping novel of great and precise imaginative intelligence; it's also the most entertaining and believable historical novel I've read in years. Jean Zimmerman is a debut novelist who already writes like an old master. Read any page of The Orphanmaster and you'll become an instant fan.” – Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life and Chang and Eng

“Jean Zimmerman's seventeenth-century New Amsterdam teems with enough intrigue, lust, and madness to give our twenty-first-century Big Apple a run for its money. And money is what drives this book – liberating, corrupting, forming the only bulwark against a terrifying, chaotic New World. Zimmerman's wit and humanity shine light in a dark woods, creating an uncommonly rich debut.” – Sheri Holman, author of The Dress Lodger

 

 “Here’s American history turned inside out, animated by Jean Zimmerman’s prodigious imagination. Monsters lurk in the shadows, chaos presses in, legends come alive, and one adventure leads with irresistible force to the next. The Orphanmaster is a breathtaking achievement.” – Joanna Scott, author of Arrogance and Various Antidotes

 

“[A] compulsively readable, heartbreaking, and grisly mystery set in a wild colonial America.” – ALA Booklist

 

“A feisty young Dutch woman, an English spy, and a local demon all cross paths in 1663 New Amsterdam, in this Ludlumesque historical thriller…a successful mix of historical fiction, spy thriller, and horror.” – Library Journal

"As in the best historical fiction, [Zimmerman] has created a kind of truce between the authority of the past and the accessibility of the present, revealing to us what it once meant to be alive, and what that history means to us now ... on nearly every page there is some unobtrusively offered word or description, of food, of architecture, of dress, that brings the period and its people into clearer focus." – USA Today

"Absorbing period fiction with the requisite colorful characters of the era." – The New York Daily News

About the Author

Jean Zimmerman was born in Tarrytown, New York. An honors graduate of Barnard College, she is the author of several works of nonfiction, including Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance and The Women of the House: How a Colonial She-Merchant Built a Mansion, a Fortune, and a Dynasty. She lives in Ossining, New York.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (June 19, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670023647
• ISBN-13: 978-0670023646
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #513,818 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Throughout my writing career I have published books that focus on the changing role of women in America, with a special emphasis on New York City.

My upcoming novel, The Orphanmaster, treats a spunky, beautiful heroine and her sensitive yet manly lover who together embark on a quest to solve a series of grisly crimes in 1663 New Amsterdam.

My previous books include Love, Fiercely, a portrait of an iconic couple of Gilded Age Manhattan, and The Women of the House, which profiled the intrepid women of one colonial-era family.

An honors graduate of Barnard College, I earned a graduate degree in writing from the Columbia University School of the Arts, published my poetry widely in literary magazines, and received a Writing Fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts.

I live with my family in Westchester County, New York.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars "The place is cursed." June 20, 2012

By E. Bukowsky HALL OF FAMETOP 50 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Jean Zimmerman captures the political, religious, and economic climate as well as the culture and physical setting of New Amsterdam in her historical thriller, "The Orphanmaster." The year is 1663. Zimmerman's heroine is the beautiful, brash and quick-witted Blandine van Couvering. The twenty-two year old woman sorely misses her parents and young sister, all dead after a tragic accident at sea. However, she is determined to plan for the future and be her own person, beholden to no one.

Blandine is an up-and-coming trader who "[takes] for granted her independent status before the law" and converses easily in Dutch, English, and French. The only question is: Will she marry her suitor, Kees Bayard, the nephew of Petrus Stuyvesant, New Amsterdam's dictatorial director-general? Against this colorful backdrop of life in the Dutch settlement before the English annexation, Zimmerman presents a macabre murder mystery. A fiend has been abducting, slaughtering, and mutilating children. Blandine and a thirty-three year old English cavalier, Richard Drummond, join forces to catch this sadistic killer.

Zimmerman adroitly depicts the greed of the Dutch West India Company whose members worshipped wealth in all its forms. They liked nothing better than the "musical ringing of coins and hollow clink of wampum." The Dutch bought and sold such commodities as clay pipes, fur pelts, pots and pans, fabric, molasses, knives, and muskets. Although many attended church, they also had a superstitious bent. In their world, demons and witches existed and could do untold harm to innocent people.

The cast includes the aforementioned Drummond, an agent of England's king who catches Blandine's eye; the titular orphanmaster, Aet Visser, whose task it is to look after orphans and place them with families (some of whom turn out to be abusive and exploitative); Martyn Hendrickson, a debauched aristocrat for whom rules are made to be broken; and Anthony Angola, a gentle giant and Blandine's devoted protector. Zimmerman provides her perspective on the mores of the times--the rich and powerful did as they pleased while the poor fended for themselves. Africans were second class citizens who existed at the pleasure of their masters. Although the Dutch mocked the one-legged Stuyvesant behind his back, they feared his thunderous wrath and punitive nature.

"The Orphanmaster" is an enlightening look at a fascinating era in American history. It might have been even more entertaining, however, had it been trimmed by at least seventy-five pages. The second half is slow-moving and wordy; the climax takes too long to materialize. In addition, the villains are one-dimensional and scarcely recognizable as human. Although some readers may be put off by the book's repetitiousness and excessive length, aficionados of historical fiction might be interested in giving Zimmerman's well-researched and ambitious novel a try. (Three and a half-stars, upgraded to four for the book's fine descriptive writing and evocative atmosphere.)

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "A beast went abroad in the colony. This beast had a special liking. Children." June 19, 2012

By Luan Gaines HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Set in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam circa 1663, the British moving ever closer to attempted acquisition, Manhattan comes vividly to life in Zimmerman's mesmerizing novel, where industry and opportunity coexist with threat and violence, where Indian Wars, accidents and disease randomly decimate families, children deprived of parents. The characters are critical components of the tale, as much for their representation of class and governance as for their individual roles in the growing mystery of missing orphans. Children- orphans- have begun to disappear, their small bodies, if found, sites of ritual horrors common to the "witika", the demon-beast apparition of Indian lore. While trade flourishes, the director general of the colony, one-legged Petrus Stuyvesant, attempts to tamp a rising panic as a killer stalks the innocent, snatching them from wilderness and public streets with impunity.

Zimmerman's heroine is Blandine van Couvering, a Dutch-American she-merchant stunningly adept at the art of the deal, building her fortune and reputation. And if there is a hero, it is the handsome Edward Drummond, an English spy sent to ferret out the regicides hiding in the New World, the targets of Charles II's redress. Though their relationship begins combatively, and Blandine is (almost) spoken for my Stuyvesant's nephew "Kees" Bayard, it will take the efforts of the unlikely, if striking pair, with some assistance by Blandine's shadow, larger-than-life African Antony Angola and Algonquin tracker Kitane to bring the marauding monster to ground. Equally critical are: Aet Visser, the official Orphanmaster, a man of diverse and questionable appetites charged with the care of orphans who arrive by ship or made parentless by tragic circumstances; the colony's wealthiest landowners, the three Hendrickson brothers, two living on a rural estate, the youngest, handsome, dissolute Martyn, in Manhattan, frequently seen in drinking and gambling establishments; and Lightening, a scarred half-breed usually lurking near Visser and capable of slipping unnoticed from one place to another while doing the bidding of a secret master.

Though Blandine refuses to consider Visser as the culprit, remembering his kindnesses when she was in his charge, the man's inexplicable actions do little to counter Drummond's suspicions. Yet the kidnappings are so swift, such scenes of shocking carnage, it is not surprising when rumors of a witika incite irrational fear and the need for a scapegoat. Thus is the stage set in Zimmerman's thrilling mix of greed, opportunity, trade, the threat of war with England and an atavistic nightmare where a demon-killer stalks the innocent, fueling paranoia in a colony dreaming of grandeur but hobbled by superstition. Historically-anchored, as nightmare-inspiring as any Grimm's Fairy Tale, the Orphanmaster is a masterpiece of mystery and horror, a precariously balanced minefield of unexpected twists, of humanity flayed to the bone by all its pretensions when the hobgoblin batters down the door. Luan Gaines/2012.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Bizarre at Times July 2, 2012

By Miller VINE™ VOICE

Format:Audible Audio Edition

In the young New Netherlands colony, orphans are disappearing. The evidence recovered suggests some may have even been partially eaten. The leading theory is a Native American beast who consumes children. Terrifying an entire community, but irrevocably changing the town's Orphanmaster, a she-merchant and an English spy hunting fugitives.

For such a dark story, I was surprised at how well it was researched. In fact some of the chapters open with headlines. You get a good sense of the politics, social protocol and economic feel of the time period. You can't help but come away with a better understanding of the origins of Manhattan.

Some warnings:
-The story is gruesome throughout
-The story's romance is contrived. It feels sort of forced amongst the rest of the subject matter.
- There are also many narrators telling the story. They are all pretty roughly sketched (but eerily memorable). The collective tells the story of the colony and it's time more than any one character. The timeline isn't fluid either. At times this ensures the reader is lost, and that the author may even be employing the confusion.

So it's not for everyone. But if you keep to it, the novel really picks up momentum towards the end of the story and even becomes focused.

The novel's narrator George Guidall was perfect. He reads the entire novel as if he's voicing over a movie trailer. I will definitely be on the lookout for more performances from him.