The Personal History of Rachel DuPree

June 14, 2010
Weisgarber's atmospheric if unexceptional debut of pioneering hardships follows a staunch South Dakota farmwife as she struggles with misgivings about her ambitious husband. The story begins as Rachel DuPree, wife of one of the only African-American ranchers in the Badlands in 1917, watches her husband, Isaac, lower their six-year-old daughter, Liz, down a well to fetch water in the midst of a terrible drought. Though she concedes it must be done, Rachel—heavily pregnant with her eighth child—is distraught, and her worries set off a chain reaction of second-guessing her loyalty to Isaac, whose schemes include buying out the neighboring ranch and leaving the family to find work during the winter. As a series of calamities befall the family, Rachel must decide whether to follow the only man she has ever loved or strike a new path of her own. Rachel's homely voice isn't the most inviting, and while the racial tensions between whites, blacks, and Native Americans is pretty surface-level, Weisgarber's depiction of survival in the harsh Badlands has its moments.

May 15, 2010
In this debut novel, long-listed for the Orange Prize, a black family struggles to hold itself together in the South Dakota Badlands of 1917, tested by drought, racism and suspicion.

The story opens with a striking scene that shows just how difficult the DuPrees have it: A two-month drought has forced Rachel, the family matriarch and novel's narrator, to send her six-year-old daughter down a well to gather enough water for the family. Rachel has been living on this arid farm for the past 14 years, moving from Chicago to follow her husband, Isaac, an Army veteran who took advantage of the Homestead Act to acquire and expand their property. Together they had seven children, five of which have survived the tough landscape, and Rachel is close to delivering another as the story begins. That tension set, Weisgarber shuttles the narrative back and forth in time, capturing Rachel's earlier life working in a boardinghouse for the black laborers at the Chicago stockyards. The owner of the boardinghouse, Rachel's future mother-in-law, is a no-nonsense promoter of black uplift (Ida B. Wells makes a cameo appearance), and deep-seated racial prejudices are a consistent theme, from the brutal race riots Rachel reads about in letters from home to the contempt Isaac has for the Native Americans he fought while in the Army. Still, most of the difficulties Rachel faces are of the domestic variety, such as keeping her children fed and healing a sick milk cow. Weisgarber's style is Alice Walker by way of Kent Haruf. She writes tenderly and with a tinge of spirituality when it comes to intimate family moments, and her spare descriptions evoke the simple territory in which the novel is set. That makes for clear storytelling, but overall the story feels curiously thin. The key plot complications—a threat to Rachel's unborn child and a revelation about a past relationship of Isaac's—arrive and fade with only modest drama. The muted tone is intended to be a testament to Rachel's indomitability, but it makes her narrator as little different psychologically at story's end as she was at the beginning.

Admirably crisp prose within a disappointingly slight study of race and family.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 15, 2010

During a 1917 drought in the Dakota Badlands, many settlers up and leave their claims. Not Isaac DuPree. He commands his wife and five children to persevere. Fourteen years ago, Rachel worked as kitchen help in the Chicago boardinghouse of Isaac's mother. When Isaac, a former Buffalo soldier, decided to start homesteading, he took Rachel as a wife so he could amass more land. For Rachel, their marriage was a love match. But Isaac's land fever knows no bounds, and Rachel's endurance begins to slip when her husband endangers one of their daughters by tying her to a rope and dropping her into a near-dry water well. Expecting their sixth child, Rachel suspects her husband may have fathered a half-Indian child while serving at Wounded Knee. Yet Isaac hates Indians. Facing a difficult winter with little foodstuff saved, Rachel ponders returning to Chicago. VERDICT Compelling historical fiction at its best, with appeal factors similar to Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain or Breena Clark's Stand the Storm, this debut novel won the Texas Institute of Letters' Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction.--Keddy Ann Outlaw, formerly with Harris County P.L., Houston, TX

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2010
Enamored of Isaac DuPree (the son of her employer) and desperate for a life beyond that of boardinghouse cook in Chicagos slaughterhouse district, Rachel accepts a deal proffered by Isaac: join him in settling 160 acres of land offered by the Homestead Act in the wilds of South Dakota. She heads off to the aptly named Badlands in a bargained marriage of at least one year. Fourteen years later, she looks back over her life, the dreams and longing of a young woman versus the harsh reality of a wife and mother living in an unforgiving territory. After months of drought, the land, the animals, and her children are parched and on the brink. She herself is on the brink, pregnant again and coping with Isaacs obsession with the land, the cruel demands on their five young children, and the isolation of being one of the few black families in the territory. A shimmering novel of the sacrifice, hardship, and determination of a black family in the early-twentieth-century settlement of the West.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)

Rachel and her husband, Isaac, hope that claiming land in South Dakota will provide opportunities that would never have existed for African Americans back East. As the incredibly grueling conditions take their toll, however, the couple begin to disagree about what's truly best for their family. An engrossing tale of grit and determination. (LJ 6/15/10)