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O Beulah Land

(Beulah Quintet #2)

Mary Lee Settle

3.56 · Rating details · 52 ratings · 8 reviews

O Beulah Land, the second volume of The Beulah Quintet-- Mary Lee Settle's unforgettable generational saga about the roots of American culture, class, and identity and the meaning of freedom--is a land-hungry story. It follows the odyssey of Johnny Church's descendants as they leave England in search of freedom and land. One of those descendants, Jonathan Lacey, settles i ...more

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Paperback, 368 pages

Published May 1st 1996 by University of South Carolina Press (first published June 12th 1981)

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Jul 14, 2017 Vel Veeter rated it liked it

So imagine the movie The VVitch taking place about a 100 years later, and in western Virginia/border of Ohio territory instead. There’s still lots of fear and anxiety but there’s no witch. Not even a little witch.

This novel comes from a collection of novels by a novelist most (including me until about a year or so ago) from West Virginis named Mary Lee Settle. One of those novelists who spends her entire career at a university, even wins some awards, but maybe doesn’t have the cultural impact of ...more

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Feb 04, 2021 Jim Grimsley rated it liked it

This is the first-written book of Settle's quintet about American identity and I think it is an impressive piece of writing in many ways, especially in the authority with which it creates the world. It is easy to forget what that notion of a more savage time entails. The world of colonial Virginia in the 18th century was made up of so much violence, the struggle of the law to maintain its authority, and the almost impossible effort of people to make a daily life composed of some comfort and love This is the first-written book of Settle's quintet about American identity and I think it is an impressive piece of writing in many ways, especially in the authority with which it creates the world. It is easy to forget what that notion of a more savage time entails. The world of colonial Virginia in the 18th century was made up of so much violence, the struggle of the law to maintain its authority, and the almost impossible effort of people to make a daily life composed of some comfort and love and family. The fact that this all happens in land that is being wrested away from its original occupants is endemic to the drama. This book at its best makes all those trials felt and the struggles of people to make a new life are moving. She is also adept at weaving the ideas that concern her - the origin of the ideals of liberty and their collision with the reality of slavery, the theft of land from the people of the First Nations, the retributions exacted by all of this. She has an economy of style that is admirable and a beauty of diction when writing of landscape. The novel suffers, in my view, from its scope: it covers periods of specific drama spaced out over forty or fifty years, and its cast of characters is large. Settle does a brave job of handling all this, but the result is that many of the people drawn here appear childlike and distant, and there are no good examples of people drawn in their complexity. Her novel Prisons, which is the first installment of this series, was written much later and is a better novel than this one, I think; she focuses the book on one character and makes him fully concrete, limiting the world to what he could utter about it in his own voice. But O Beulah Land is nevertheless a lovely novel. A modern reader would want a fuller depiction of the slaves, less dialect spelling, and more of an examination of race. At least this reader did. The slaves are mostly faceless and utilitarian. The First Nations characters are largely the same. But in fact so are the settlers with only a few exceptions. This is a book of ambition but in the end the ambition is not achieved, but there is some greatness in the attempt. ...more

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Jun 11, 2013 Chad rated it did not like it

Recommends it for: nobody

Shelves: avoid

The truth is that I did not read the whole book. I did not even read most of it.

I read the first book in the Beulah Quintet, Prisons, first. A member of my Significant Other's family picked up a used copy of it and gave it to me in a book exchange; I don't remember what book I gave her. It took me most of a year to get around to reading it, but once I started it I ended up getting completely absorbed in what turned out to be an amazing piece of literature. I decided I needed to read the rest of ...more

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Sep 24, 2017 Susan Beecher rated it it was amazing

Very fine and beautifully written novel about 1760s through 1770s America prior to the Revolutionary War. Several of the main characters were English who were convicted of minor crimes and sent to the colonies as punishment. Highly recommend this book.

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Mar 02, 2011 Matt rated it it was amazing

I first encountered O BEULAH LAND when my history professor at U.Va., Stephen Innes, assigned it for his Colonial America class. It was the only piece of fiction he assigned, and he said he did so because it illustrated ways of living and thinking and striving in colonial Virginia better than many non-fiction works. He was absolutely right.

I read a great deal of historical fiction, and O BEULAH LAND is one of the best examples of immersing readers fully in another time and place. Settle makes th ...more

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Jun 03, 2015 Evelyn rated it it was ok

This was one of those books that I kept checking pages numbers to see how many more before the end of the chapter, the end of the part and the end of the book. This is a dead giveaway for a book I am not enjoying all that much. I was not able to connect with any of the characters, but I did like the setting and the descriptions of life in that time.

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Oct 21, 2013 Kallie rated it really liked it

This book begins with a scene, so powerful -- a woman 'crawling' east over the Appalachias -- that it brought me back to the series after a decades-long hiatus. Now I am reading the rest of the series and find these books among the best historical novels ever written. ...more

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