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    Kind One: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Kind One: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Kind One: A Novel
    Ebook192 pages2 hours

    Kind One: A Novel

    By Laird Hunt

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A “profoundly imaginative, strikingly original, deeply moving” antebellum tale of two slave girls who take their white mistress into captivity (Kirkus Reviews).
     
    In “a novel that upends what we expect from slavery narratives,” teenage Ginny marries Linus Lancaster, her mother’s second cousin, and moves to his Kentucky pig farm ninety miles from nowhere (Roxane Gay). In the shadows of the lush Kentucky landscape, Ginny discovers the empty promises of Lancaster’s paradise—a place where the charms of her husband fall away to reveal a troubled man and cruel slave owner. Ginny befriends the young slaves Cleome and Zinnia who work at the farm—until Lancaster’s attentions turn to them, and she finds herself torn between her husband and her only companions. The events that follow Lancaster’s death change all three women for life.
     
    Haunting, chilling, and suspenseful, Kind One is a powerful tale of redemption and human endurance in antebellum America, “as devastating a piece of writing as anything one is likely to find in contemporary literature” (Contemporary Review of Fiction).
     
    “This compact but reverberant 19th-century tale tracks a circle of hard-luck souls whose collective tears could fill a dry well. . . . Hunt passes the narration among the principle characters in woozily nonlinear fashion, lending a range of textures to this antebellum melodrama.” —New York Times Book Review
     
    “Opening with a prologue in the form of an extraordinarily beautiful meditation on loss, Hunt’s writing deepens into allegory, symbolism and metaphor, all while spinning forth a dark tale of abuse, incest, and corruption reminiscent of Faulkner.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
     
    “An unforgettable tale of the savagery of antebellum America. . . . Hunt deftly maintains an unsettling tone and a compelling narrative that will linger with readers long after the last page.” —Publishers Weekly
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateSep 13, 2012
    ISBN9781566893176
    Unavailable
    Kind One: A Novel
    Author

    Laird Hunt

    Laird Hunt's most recent novel, Zorrie, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Hunt has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Anisfield­-Wolf Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, and Italy's Bridge Award. He teaches in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University and lives in Providence.

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    Reviews for Kind One

    3.5/5

    19 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Laird Hunt explores themes of race and slavery, its consequences of abuse and violence, as well as questions of sexuality and incest. The novel tells these cogent tales with beautiful, dark imagery, fully rounded characters, compelling action, and vivid descriptions. All this in two hundred pages. This deeply provocative work probes these issues sometimes through allegory and symbolism and sometimes explicitly, or it could be said, through good-old-fashioned storytelling. The narrative jumps around in time, and at first this felt confusing, but then fell into place as the story filled in. Most of the narrative is told from the point of view of Ginny, but Hunt bookends these ten chapters with short pieces from the perspective of other characters, all told in an immediate first-person voice. The overall effect lingers and haunts. This story seems to represent not just the lives of the few people portrayed, but a larger underbelly of America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Powerful enough to feel instantly like a timeless classic, this book deserves a thorough investigation. As page-turning as it is difficult, Kind One is a pleasure to read.
    • 4/5
      The kind of 4 star you give when it's pretty great but you love other books by the same author even more. That said this'll linger in my brain a good long while.
    • 3/5
      Something like...3.5 maybe. Very different writing technique, and unlike anything I've read. That however caused some confusion in understanding just what was going on. Dream sequences were odd, and a bit much, very fanciful and obscure.

      I'd read Hunt's NEVERHOME, and really liked it. In this book, a young woman becomes the wife of her mother's second cousin, on a pig farm in Kentucky where she finds the promises of a big manor home far from reality and where the two servant girls eventually take her into captivity. But all of this is only eventually understood through varying and different accounts.

      You might want to take a peek preview before you decide to read. I liked it. I didn't love it.