Customer Reviews

This Widowed Land

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I avoided this book because it involved missionaries, well I was mistaken. This is a excellent addition to Ms Gears work. I couldn't put it down, literally. I took the day and just read. Fabulous.

So much research went into this book, it felt like I was right there with the characters.Kathleen deserves all the awards possible for such hard work I loved the book, I was sorry to see it end.I can't wait to see what she does next, she is a genius!

Is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.

Deuteronomy 24:17 Thou shalt not pervert the judgment of the stranger, nor of the fatherless; nor take a widow's raiment to pledge.

What I remember from this book was the contrast between two jesuit priests sent into the wilds of Quebec to live among the tame Huron Indian tribe. One priest truly understood the love of God, the other, more legalistic and harsh, a rules rules kind of person, carrying his cross, rosary, bible wherever he went. The vector of the epidemic which rages amongst the Huron peoples following the jesuits arrival comes from one of the implements of their faith.

Kathleen O'Neal Gear and her husband Michael are both archeologists who have worked in the past for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Years ago, I read their series of books on American Indian tribes of North America which starts with The People of the Wolf, the account of the indians migration across the Bering Strait. Totally loved those books, learned so much about the different tribes' lifestyle and culture. Some common misconceptions of these people disproved by the evidence found hidden underneath the dirt covering their remains.

Excellent research by the author. It is much better than sitting in History class. I find it interesting the beliefs of the Indians and Jesuits. Also enjoyed the romance going on between a Priest and an Indian and there beliefs involving such relationship.

Prose in the first couple of chapters is a bit distracting, flowery and uneven. Gear is not at her best in description. Once the "story" kicks in, the spare style is fine and her narrative is excellent.

Of the five or six novels written by the Gears that I have read this one is the first that I thought had an "agenda." Spiritualism (see my other reviews) was endemic to the Native American Culture and I don't have a problem with historical fiction portraying individuals as motivated by those views. It was important to them in their time and place and realism would require that the characters reflect those spiritual dimensions. I did not overly object in the previous books I read when the Gears portrayed the spirits as not only existing but essentially defining the narrative flow. I have no doubt that the Native Americans had real spiritual experiences in which, whether delusional or not, they interacted with spiritual beings. In the same way that I accepted "magic" in the Harry Potter series, I accepted spiritualism here.

In this novel, Kathleen Gear goes beyond this general narrative structure and embarks upon an implicit campaign to essentially reduce all spirituality to a common identity. It is more than "all religions lead to the same God." It is essentially "all religions are the same religion in different packages." I appreciated Gear's research into the apocalyptic dimensions of the European views on the New World and particularly the Native Americans as the lost tribes of Israel. I also was delighted with her development of the tension Jesuit Missionaries experienced in trying to bridge the cultural gap with the different cultures they encountered (all over the world). Her mention of the controversy that developed over the missionaries in China adopting Chinese garb and even minimizing the Trinity so as to make the doctrines of the Church accessible to that culture was well done.

But given that good beginning, Gear moves on to identifying the spiritual beings in the Huron cosmology with the Triune God. That the general teachings and character of Jesus is so far removed from the spirit who not only tolerated torture of prisoners but accepted the cannibalism that accompanied it, seemed not to bother her at all. For Gear, the fact that both Christians and Native Americans have spiritual "experiences" which have basic things in common, appears to be enough to render them as essentially the same.

If Gear had left it to where the individuals had basically interpreted their experiences along these lines, then the story would have been rooted in the human condition and the human framework in which these things were understood. That would have been OK. But she seemed intent on validating these ideas by the actual interaction of the spiritual beings with the humans, even to the point where the Native American "spirits" rescue both a Christian and Native American and thereby validates both their "faiths". She further has a re-enactment of the "self-sacrifice" of the Cross in a similar situation.

All together there is too much of it not to be understood as making a point, so much so, that it actually detracts from her otherwise superb story-telling.

So much research went into this book, it felt like I was right there with the characters.Kathleen deserves all the awards possible for such hard work I loved the book, I was sorry to see it end.I can't wait to see what she does next, she is a genius!

Kathleen makes you feel, hear and almost taste the things she writes about . In any number of her books the feeling of being there makes the story come alive.Your spirit awakens with each boo