“Seven Locks” by Christine Wade – The Despair of Abandonment

Ever since our distant ancestors began to live in societies, having the respect of one's neighbors has always been, to varying extents, an important rule of survival, especially in smaller societies where everyone knows everyone else.

When neighbors start turning on each other, or worse, mobbing up on a specific target, then survival quickly becomes a very real issue.

In Seven Locks by Christine Wade, we are told a story set in the late 1700s in pre-Revolutionary America, that of a mother who has to contend with the never-ending persecution from her neighbors following the sudden and mysterious departure of her husband, leaving her alone on the farm with the children.

At first the rumors say that her nagging drove him away... after a while, as rumors always tend to, they snowball into the idea that the wife murdered him and ground him into sausage meat. The story is that of the mother and her lifelong struggle to survive and make a home for her children in the most dreadful of circumstances.

Well, the first thing one notices is that Seven Locks certainly isn't one of those feel-good stories where we see the quirky, comical and emotional struggles people undergo in search of themselves and a place on this Earth.

Rather, the book takes a much more realistic approach to the whole thing, and tells the story how it would actually happen in real life... and as we all know, life has a habit of reserving happy endings for only a select few.

Rather than aiming to tell a story, in my opinion at least, the book is more of a character study and an exploration into the nature of desperation, society, alienation from a community and unrightful persecution.

Though there are certainly plenty of lush descriptions of Hudson River valley that truly bring that epoch to life, the book does tend to pull towards the negative, exhibiting the full spectrum of crushing despair and anguish felt by the mother as she desperately tries to cling to her roots and gives her body and soul to make her children's lives work in some way.

Morally-speaking, most of the characters find themselves in the gray zone; they make good and bad decisions, but are always motivated by things that would drive us with equal strength to commit the same actions, were we to find ourselves in those characters' shoes.

The mother is especially interesting, approaching her life in an introspective manner, making the necessary decisions to survive, even though they end up costing her the essence of what makes her life worth living. There truly is a lot of food for thought to be found here about the ultimate worth of the sacrifices we could be called to make.

All in all, Seven Locks is certainly a very solid and thought-provoking entry in its genre, paying as much mind to recreating the period as telling a harrowing story with rather powerful messages, or at least ideas.

If you aren't deterred by books that can actually get your spirits down and are yearning for a sublimely-paced piece of historical fiction you won't soon forget, I wholeheartedly urge you to check this novel out.

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Christine Wade Personal site Christine Wade is an American writer who only recently got into the whole thing, and her first novel, Seven Locks, earned her the James Jones Fellowship Award in 2009 for an unpublished novel, and in 2013 an Honorable Mention at the 2013 Langum Prize for Historical Fiction, not to mention recognized as Best Historical Fiction of 2013 by USA BOOK News.