This Other Eden is based on a true event, when the State of Maine evicted the entire mixed-race community of Malaga Island, people whose forefathers had lived there since the 18th century, and placed 11 of them in a home for the feeble-minded.
It’s no coincidence that a conference on Eugenics takes place just before the committee of the Governor’s Council of the State of Maine begins considering the fate of the occupants of Apple Island, a fate the occupants have no say in. It’s the turn of the 20th century, but Benjamin Honey arrived on the island in 1793 with his pockets full of apple seeds, bringing his wife Patience.
Now four small families live on the island, the Honeys, the McDermotts, the Proverbs, and the Larks, along with the abandoned Sockalexis children, all guilty only of being dirt poor and mixed race. They live by subsistence fishing and gathering the fruits of the forest. The winters are brutal. In the spring, the schoolteacher/preacher Matthew Diamond settles in his house across the bay and rows over daily to teach the children. The mainlanders consider the islanders inbred and sub-intelligent, but Matthew Diamond knows that Esther Honey, the matriarch, can recite Shakespeare from memory, that he has to teach himself algebra to stay ahead of Emily Sockalexis, that Tabitha Honey has a gift for Latin, and Ethan Honey is a talented artist.
The fate of the islanders is already decided when the Governor’s Council arrives and starts measuring their heads with calipers and asking them idiotic “intelligence” questions. Matthew Diamond decides to try to save Ethan, so he writes a letter to his friend Thomas Hale in Enon, Massachusetts, asking him to sponsor Ethan at an art school. Soon, Ethan leaves the island.
Harding’s writing is sometimes poetic, and he likes to pursue extended metaphors. Sometimes I liked this, and other times I didn’t have the patience for it. However, I found this novel less obscure than the other two of his I have read, touching, and ultimately with a more positive ending than was probably the case with the actual inhabitants of Malaga Island.
I read this book for my Booker Prize project.
whatmeread 
I have heard review of this novel from several sites, and it seems an interesting read. Although, maybe not so easy to read. I don’t really read a lot of American “classical” authors, he is a Pulitzer prize winner as well, so might try for this one.
I’m not sure what you mean by classical. He’s sort of a poetic writer, but he was only born in 1967, so I doubt if you’d call him classical. He’s not really modernist or postmodern. I don’t know what you’d call him.
I did not mean classic in that way, more like he is writing in a classical way, like William Faulkner for example. Or, I might be totally wrong.
Faulkner is a modernist. I’m not sure how you would categorize Harding. He is not interested in stylistics, so he’s hard to fit into a slot.
Maybe you’re talking about literary fiction rather than genre fiction.
Certainly sounds like an interesting subject
Thanks for sharing your review with the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge!
Not quite so easy reading as some.