I enjoyed the writing style of this book, I thought it was beautiful and raw and I often couldn’t put it down. I found the characters interesting and deep.
The story takes place on a small island off the coast of Maine. It’s quite a sad and terrible tale, maybe the saddest part is the truth of it.
The author did a great job bringing that place to life by the words used and the way the story played out.
I did have trouble with the formatting of it, and at times some of the sentences seemed to blend together in my mind and I would have to start the page over.
Thank you to Net Galley and WW Norton and Company for the advanced readers copy in exchange for a truthful review.

3,5/5 stars. I think I would have enjoyed it more if there were breaks in the story (chapters)

Highly recommended for fans of literary fiction.

THIS OTHER EDEN takes its time getting started, but the patient reader is rewarded.

The islanders are admirable and sympathetic, especially as outsiders begin to impact their way of life. The novel made me interested to learn more about the actual history behind these events.

As always, Harding's writing is gorgeous--dense and poetic. He paints a vivid portrait that invites the reader in.

A lovely read from start to finish.

I feel like This Other Eden would have benefitted from keeping the story but changing the writing style a bit. I didn't enjoy the paragraph long sentences and it was hard to follow at times. I did enjoy the exploration of the characters, and the commentary on Eugenics.

The novel opens with the riveting story of a terrible storm washing over a small island off the coast of Maine, with a family clinging to the branches of a large tree and watching houses and people caught in the angry waters in the flood below. The Eden that Benjamin Honey had built was destroyed in 1815. His wife Esther tells the tale to her grandchildren, the history of their Ark island.

The Honey family had lived there for six generations, since an African ex-slave Civil War veteran and his Irish wife settled there. Their neighbors included the Larks with their colorless children, and the McDermott sisters who took in three orphaned Native American children, and the spinster Annie Parker, and Civil War veteran Zachary Hand who preferred his hollow tree to his cabin. The mixed races of the families had produced individuals of every type, the pale and the dark, green eyes and red hair, straight hair and tightly curled.

It’s a harsh life but they have survived. Theirs is a tolerant society where brother and sister raise their children, and a man can don his mother’s dress to keep house while his wife cuts her hair and goes fishing on the ocean.

The state sent a pastor to open a school. The community is Christian, the Bible and Shakespeare among the few, tattered books in the community. The teacher discovered a girl who is a mathematical prodigy, a boy who masters Latin, and another who is a gifted, untrained artist.

The Eugenics movement was at its height. The islanders were disturbing. They were measured and assessed, labeled and judged to be degenerate by the “plain white” of the mainland. The mixing of races, the intermixing of blood, could not produce anything but imbeciles, morons, and degenerates.

The entire population of Apple Island was relocated, many to institutions.

The early book takes us into these people’s lives and personalities. Yes, there are relationships that we may judge to be perverse. There are people whose sanity we may doubt. A girl who only eats wild things she finds, starfish and snakes. One woman was abused by her father, and intended to murder the resultant child. She was prevented, and her child and his children became the center of her old age. Zachary Hand carves images in his hollow tree where he finds peace. But we have sympathy for these people. They are removed from the world and a society that could not have accepted them, eking out a subsistence life, doing the best they could with what they had.

The teacher determines to ‘save’ one child of the island, a fifteen-year-old boy with straight hair and and greenish eyes. He writes an acquaintance, hoping he would take the boy in until he could enter art school. It seemed a mercy to separate Ethan Honey from his family’s fate, to allow him access to white society.

For all his good intentions, the teacher creates a series of disastrous events. Years in the future, historians will explore the buried history of the deserted island, and write about the paintings and drawings of the mysterious Ethan Honey.

Beautifully written, with stunning descriptive passages and a mounting urgency, this is a novel of history and a vision of what society could have become, a condemnation and a warning.

I received a free galley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

I wanted to enjoy this book but I found the prose hard to interpret and understand and the overall narrative left something to be desired.

Thanks to NetGalley and WW Norton and Company for this advance reader copy of The Other Eden in exchange for a fair review.

Heartbreaking and maddening, this Historical Fiction work brings to life the unknown (to most of the country) tale of a small island off the coast of Maine that was settled by a couple (he Black, and she Irish) and was occupied for more than a century. During the time of Eugenics, the powers that be in Maine decided that these people, now generations later and having survived the harshness of the coast of Maine with little help from the outside, must be insane or feeble minded and are evicted from their home. Harding imagines a school teacher who saves one boy, a white skinned artist, as the most likely one to thrive in the mostly white Northeast. This is a true story in the eviction of these people, but fiction in the individuals themselves as their stories have faded.

I struggled with this one. I was captivated by the story and characters that had drawn me in from the beginning. The writing style was difficult for me, as I was trying to read it not for myself, but for the average book reader who likes historical fiction. This book is one chapter. Many of the sentences are a paragraph long. The voice of the book is like a storyteller who might embellish the story mid sentence or follow a twig of the story but loops it all back in the end. I've heard these story tellers speak, and my husband will accuse me of doing the same, as they weave intricate stories and using their entire bodies to enthrall an audience. The down side of the writing is that you can't really put the book down anywhere without losing your place. I got lost a few times, shaking my head but carrying on. This style of writing was difficult for me.

3* for the story itself, the imagery, and the characters themselves. I'll leave the rest for you to decide.