A horse named Raven pulled me deep into this story, a historical tale set in Puritan-era New England where a woman named Silence is punished for expressing outsized emotions and must endure a year of not speaking.
Of course I would gravitate to author Julia Park Tracey’s book. A while ago, I took up that subject myself in a fantasy short story titled The Exile’s Tale and published in the collection Imagination Fully Dilated. In my story, the women of a village are forbidden from speaking once they pass their child-bearing years. It’s not the wisest limitation, denying half of the most experienced community members their ability to share their wisdom.
As in Tracey’s powerful rendering, at some point the men want the silenced women to speak up.
Of course the women don’t. Not in my version. Not in Tracey’s.
Tracey’s book captured me in a way that always delights me when it happens. I start reading, and the story is fine, the writing is good, and I continue because I want to know what happens. But a phone call, a knock on the door, a remembered task — any of those things can pull me away from a book that is simply good.
In the best books, a turn happens. It could be anything, an ingenious plot twist, a surprising character development, a beguiling landscape. A shift occurs. Everyday reality drops away, sparking an intimacy between me and the text. At that point, it’s hard to put the book down.
In the case of Silence, it happened for me on page 142. Don’t mistake me. I was fully enjoying the book before page 142. Then the character Silence takes a moment to stroke the face of the horse. She tickles Raven’s blaze, brushes back the forelock. Raven nickers and tries to nibble her sleeve. Then this sentence: “I lean down to pluck some grass to palm for her, and she takes it with whiskery lips and a saucy nodding of her head.”
At that sentence, I quietly fell inside, and didn’t fully emerge until the last page.
I’ve stopped trying to explain these moments to myself or others. I’m ensnared, not only by the tale, but also by the skill in the telling, where a small, arguably inconsequential moment is given its due by an author for whom there are, perhaps, no inconsequential moments.
This book is rich in the daily-life moments of constrained women. Its plot engine runs on power dynamics in the era where witchery accusations could still be a death sentence, religious tolerance itself a sin. But, to turn an old phrase upside down, its angels are in its details.
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 