Brookland is one of the best books I’ve read in a long, long time. It brings a new meaning to the term “historical fiction,” not just presenting us with a fictional account of historic events, but also giving us an original fictional event in a historic setting.

In the years around and after the American Revolution and in the first few decades of the new United States, a remarkable family lives in early Brooklyn, across the water from the island of Manhattan. The title’s use of a variant of the latter tips off the reader to the variation between history and pure story. Prue Winship, the eldest daughter, learns to take over the family gin distillery in the absence of a son while also dreaming of bigger things—much bigger things.

The Winship family and sisters are large as life and realistic. It’s easy for modern writers to fall into the trap of writing those women fortunate enough to find a place in a man’s world as being so modern they’re almost our contemporaries, but Barton casts the Winship sisters, their family, and their neighbors well: there are spheres of acceptability, subworlds in which women can be as openly opinionated as men only given the right circumstances. Two of the Winship daughters, Prue (Prudence) and Tem (Temperance) (which may be the funniest name I’ve ever heard for the daughter of a distiller) fit the criteria. Pearl, the mute middle daughter, does not. Literally silenced in the way that many women of the day were figuratively silenced, she has far less control of her destiny than most other women, never mind her unusually independent sisters.

Prue dreams of building a bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan—and, with the help of her sisters and lifelong friends/fiancé and distillery foreman, begins to make it happen. The details of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Brooklyn and New York State are fine and rich, and you learn not only tidbits about life in early nineteenth century Brooklyn but bits and pieces of how the early New York State legislature worked, what modern architecture was like, how the ideals of the enlightenment influenced wealthy (if tradesman) society in the young country.

Admittedly, it’s now been almost two months since I read this book in early April, which is why I’m giving more details of what happened than how I felt. I’ll have to leave this with saying that I felt happier reading this book than I had in a long time: it’s one of those rare books that’s long enough that I didn’t feel as though it was over too quickly without being so long that I got impatient for the end. The characters were well drawn with few, if any caricatures: even the people seldom mentioned are multifaceted, like the boatman who opposes the bridge because it will ruin his business but still wishes the best for the daughters of his old friend.

Before I close off and head to the quotes, I have to spare a moment to mention the gorgeous cover design: an old print done in gold over a photo of a wooded river. The gold shines in contrast to the deep blue of the water

Quote Roundup

12) If heaven was as free from want as the domine described it, then the New-Yorkers’ insatiable need of gin & fruit meant they were living in hell.
Even before the United States has formed, here’s this idea of New York as a place of gluttony and misery. Perhaps an example of the modern informing the past? Whatever the case, it tickled me to see this idea expressed when New York is in its relative infancy.

28) Prue, Pearl, and Tem are bungled up “like Esquimaux” to explore the ice bridge be between Manhattan and Brooklyn. I had to make a note to look this up, since I was curious about when Europeans would have been in contact with Inuits for the first time. Esquimaux is apparently the French plural form of the word for Inuits, and since the term “Eskimo” is a general word applying to indigenous people all around the northern polar areas, it is quite possible that this word and knowledge of these people existed in the early/mid nineteenth century.

98) “‘For if ye love them that love you,’” he read, “‘what reward have ye?’ Why that is commerce, exchange, shilling for shilling. Anybody can do that. ‘And salute your brethren only,’—that is, if you greet only those that belong to your church or think as you think, or act as you act—‘do not even the publicans so?’“
A common enough sermon, especially in fiction, but I did like the way that this one was delivered. It’s refreshing, for Prue (and for me), to hear humor in a sermon (in a book) about such an important topic, one of the most quoted and least followed rules of Christianity.

For some reason there were no quotes for a long stretch in the middle even though I definitely remember enjoying stories of the Winship girls’ childhoods.

224) On perhaps Mr. Fischer’s fourth night in Brooklyn, Tem had banged in[to the Twin Tankards] at the close of the workday, thirsty for her pint, and poor Mr. Fischer had fallen in love with her in an instant. … “I’ve never seen such lovely gams,” Ezra Fischer said in a tone of reverence.
“Actually,” Tem said loudly, “I’ll wager you’ve never seen any gams at all, as women don’t damn well display them. Unless, of course, you are referring to your taste for whores, quite a pretty few of whom you’ll find upstairs.”
Go Tem! Also, for those of you curious, “gams” are apparently women’s legs. Tem and Prue wear trousers out of practicality from their work in the distillery.

231) Prue discovers that Pearl knows a good bit about her reasons for wanting to build a bridge, including her original thought as a child that New York was the land of the dead.
“It isn’t only that. I learned I’d been mistaken, of course, a hundred years ago.”
[Pearl]It’s for Mother & Father?
“And for myself also. To have done something that wasn’t handed down to me.” She hadn’t known she thought this until she said it.
I feel a fair bit of kinship for Prue. Though life is far different these days and parents’ work is rarely passed down to their children, I still felt, growing up, a bit like I took the place of the oldest/only son in the family. I inherited my dad’s coin collection and interests in the outdoors and working with my hands. I spent more time with him than did either of my sisters, and as much as I feel (and enjoy, to a certain extent, feeling) a responsibility for carrying on the family legacy, I still look for the thing I can do that belongs to myself, the mark I can make that is both part of and separate from my family legacy. Doubt it will be anything as monumental as a bridge, but I’m still trying to figure it out.

272) An idiot gentleman whose behavior defines the word meets Pearl for the first time. “Is she for sale, then? I’ve long fancied a wife who wouldn’t talk back to me.”
Ben said, “Oh, bless you, but she does talk back,” while Pearl wrote, Devill take you, Sir, held it up to her companion in her left hand, and continued on with her breakfast.
Go Pearl! I’d have loved to have her hit him across the face with her book, but there’s only so much fiction you can hope for, isn’t there?

285) How Prue envied [Ben] his man’s figure—his squared shoulders and even his pointy, clean-shaven chin—for how it enabled him to stand up thus before them. She loved him dearly, and at the same time felt what seemed love’s opposite: a sickening jealousy.
This is a delicate balance to strike: as I mentioned before, it’s easy to fall into the trap of making women seem so modern that they chafe against their roles in the same way that a contemporary woman, transplanted back in time, might feel. I think Barton managed the balance, though. For all her jealousy of Ben, Prue nevertheless feels constrained by the societal norms that dictate that Ben needs to speak while she remains silent: it’s not just frustration, it’s a genuine feeling that even though she knows the bridge, she can’t do this as well as he could—partly because it’s not “in a woman’s nature” and partly because that “nature” won’t permit other men to take her seriously. For all her frustration, she has more trouble crossing the divide than, I think, most women today would have.

338) The spring thaw arrived early in 1799, though it brought with it the state legislature’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery. … The Act, Prue realized, struck a fine balance between pleasing those who relied upon slave labor to make their living and assuaging those who opposed it on moral grounds: All adult slaves were to remain in bondage for the rest of their lives, though they would henceforward be called “indentured servants,” and all children born after the coming Fourth of July would be freed in the 1820s, after having given their best years of service to their masters.
I spent plenty of time in APUS History discussing the Constitutional note that slavery would be banned in the early 1800s, but I really didn’t learn much about legislative bans to slavery at the state level. This discussion was new and interesting to me (I learned a lot of history this book, mostly in the forms of characters whose names now appear on street signs and subway stops), but I also appreciated the reality of Prue’s concerns: regardless of her moral feeling about slavery, she has a business to run, one that currently depends on slave labor. Again, it’s easy for modern writers to make their historical fictional women characters abolitionist, feminist saints. I admire Barton’s successful efforts to complicate her characters in a realistic way.

354) Another difficult but wonderful moment for the women in this story. Though Prue has never gotten along with her sister-in-law, Patience, the two come to an understanding as the latter comforts the former after a difficult miscarriage. Women don’t always have to hate each other forever, just because they have different values and wildly different lives.

402) Prue had hoped for the best and half expected the worst, and could not quote force this information to fit either category.
Ah, a familiar feeling to us all, I’m sure! Though not always on the scale of what’s in this scene.

437) Prue finally comes to realize the truth of the curse she placed on her sister.
I saw the curse lay not on the words I had uttered, which had scudded away across to Mannahata never to be recalled; but in the manner in which I’d allowed them to color my behavior toward her, ever since. For 23 years I had showered my guilt upon her, thought of protecting her, bought her gifts, worry’d on her behalf; but I had never once simply looked to see in whose interest I had done all this. Had I done so, I might have seen the depth of that streak running through her, or how she felt confined or unhappy. But you see, I did not.
I found this reveal all the more powerful for how simple it is. It’s betrayal on the small scale, devastating in its pervasiveness in a way that her inability to think in Pearl’s best interests the one time Pearl has thought in her own doesn’t quite capture. It’s not just the hypocrisy of her behavior toward Pearl, it’s the definition of killing with kindness (albeit unintentionally).

465) I challenge any man who claims haunting by the dead to feel the chill of haunting by uncertainty, & I will shew you a changed man.

477) Even at that sorrowful time, perhaps the oddest thing about the whole affair seemed to me how people on both sides of the river had well nigh forgotten I’d had aught to do with the disastrous bridge. I was still Prue Winship, Distiller of Gin; but your father, wherever he went, was the Architect of the Folly. Few but Ben, Isaiah, & my own two sisters had ever known that the idea, at its origin, had been mine alone; but it struck me as passing strange how even Simon Dufresne & Theunis van Vechten lamented Ben’s misjudgment of the foundations, without once mentioning how I had drawn up the articles of our misfortune.
Prue unexpectedly benefits from the sexism of the time; even the people who saw her participation in the construction of the bridge forget her involvement in it because her actions automatically belong to her husband—both because no one would think that a woman was capable of creating something like the bridge and because her husband would be responsible for anything she did.
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Good historical fiction must revolve around characters whose thoughts and personalities accurately reflect their time; one of the worst mistakes a writer can make is put modern thoughts, words, and actions into someone living in a totally different era. The idea of a colonial woman running a gin distillery and attempting to build a bridge across the East River at first glance might seem anachronistic-no woman in the 1700's would have even thought about it. But Prudence Winship is totally believable and her quest to build the bridge and its aftermath are convincing.

The Winships are free thinkers who have carved their place by establishing a successful gin distillery. With only girls to inherit the business, Prudence and her sister Temperance take their place learning all aspects of the business while Pearl, a sister unable to speak, takes care of the household. The early death of their parents, puts Prudence in charge of the business sooner than expected, but also gives her the reason and confidence to pursue a dream of building a bridge to link Brooklyn to Manhatten. The bridge soons becomes an obsession which affects the lives of all the sisters and those they care about.

The writing of this unusual look at colonial times is clean and straightforward. The story is told from the viewpoint of Prudence writing to her own grown daughter who wants to know more about the "missing pieces of her family history" - the subject everyone has avoided for so many years - the building of the bridge. The author skillfully interwines Prudence's thoughts to her daughter with the history. Since Pearl cannot speak, she must communicate through writing of notes; Pearl's spelling and wording remain faithful to colonial language.

Although sometimes the details of distilling gin and engineering a bridge are almost more than I wanted to know, they project an authencity necessary for good historical fiction. This is a wonderful book and one that any lover of historical fiction should find fascinating. ( )

Prudence is the eldest daughter of a successful gin distiller. When no son is born, the father decides to allow Pru to join him in his business, an unusual choice in America's earliest days. Pru is followed into the business by her younger sister, Temperance, who is, ironically, quite a frequent tippler. A third sister, Pearl, is born mute and is overly sheltered by Pru. Her rebellion near the end of the novel is disastrous. One of the interesting aspects of the novel is that Pru and Tem succeed in overcoming the prejudices against women that would have limited their lives, yet they place even stricter limitations on Pearl's life because of her handicap.

The main focus of the book is Pru's driven desire to build a bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan. The process is covered in great detail, yet we know at the beginning of the book that the effort leads to disaster. Perhaps it is intended as a lesson in hubris but that doesn't align well with the generally feminist themes of the book. ( )

I would normally love so many things about this book: a strong female protagonist, the use of historically relevant language, a new way of thinking about a place I already know... But somehow, I couldn't become involved in or attached to the story, which is my true barometer of enjoyment. So, I will assume it was me... ( )

The author has rave reviews from the likes of Thomas Pynchon, so I expected something special. This just never grabbed me though, and given the basic plot it should have. I love historical fiction and as a native New Yorker I love books about my city. I haven't seen many novels set in the New York City during and right after the Revolutionary War--a period when slavery was still legal in the state and much of Brooklyn, Queens--even Manhattan--were still forest and farms.

The book is also centered on strong, active female characters. Because Matthew Winship has no sons, he trains his daughters to run his gin distillery. His eldest, Prudence, inheriting with her sisters, decides to build a bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan. (Not the Brooklyn Bridge, which began construction much later in 1870. This bridge is fictional.) Every once in a while in history there are women who break the mold of the roles the age sets for them, so I didn't find the premise all that improbable. But the farther into the book I got, the slower and slower I found myself reading. Too much of the book is taken up with Prue's guilt over her jealous curse when she was five-years-old of her then not yet born younger sister, who was then born mute. It probably doesn't help that early on Prue admits she wasn't much of a mother, not caring much about her daughter until she misses her after her marriage.

None of the characters ever really won my sympathy, and somehow I just never felt that sense of another place and time alien to my own that I find so fascinating in well-done historical fiction. Nothing here that kept me wanting to read, until around a third through the 400 page plus book I gave up. ( )