This Other Eden

“Benjamin Honey surveyed his orchard in the cooling air and sharpening, iridescent, ocean-bent sunset light, the greens and purples deepening from their radiant flat day-bright into catacombs of shadowed fruit and limb and leaf. It felt as if his mother were somewhere among the rows.”

Benjamin Honey plants his orchard to reconnect with his mother. He has a memory of her in an orchard and wants to honor her legacy by recreating the orchard setting. By doing so, the orchard becomes his mother, and when it is washed away in the hurricane, he mourns it like a member of his family.

“Esther drowsed with her granddaughter, Charlotte, in her lap, curled up against her spare body, wrapped in a pane of Hudson’s Bay wool from a blanket long ago cut into quarters stitched from tatters even older.”

The quilt in this excerpt represents the community of Apple Island and the Honey family. It is a quilt that is stitched together from different, old materials, representing the coming together of different people. Apple Island is diverse, and the Honey family can trace its roots across the world, and despite its patchwork, it keeps both Esther and Charlotte warm.

“It was a whale-circling, nosing at Patience and the other fugitives newly arrived in his kingdom, until he caught sight of an ancient great white shark cruising through the schoolhouse, trolling for drowned children and spinster marms. The whale launched after its prehistoric nemesis and the monsters jetted away from the shallows of the newly drowned world back into the proper abyss.”

In this excerpt, the whale acts as a guardian of Apple Island. It chases the whale away from the members of the community and back into the ocean, where it belongs. The shark represents the preying forces outside of the island, like the government that will eventually evict the islanders and claim the land for the state.