cover image Margaret Cape

Margaret Cape

Wylene Dunbar. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), $23 (352pp) ISBN 978-0-15-100248-1

""But it was last Wednesday week, the eighth day of September, she was said to appear anew on the Square as if she were alive...."" In the elliptical, incantatory phrases of an oft-told legend, first-novelist Dunbar presents the life story of Massachusetts-born Margaret Finley, who awakens from a decades-long catatonic sleep at age 80 to remember, claim and complete her sojourn on earth. Told as a youth by her father, a doctor, that to live one's own life means knowing and heeding one's story, Margaret, from the time she is a sensitive girl, pursues guiding marks and intuitions as ""she would follow a path in an unfamiliar wood."" As a young nurse-in-training in a Boston hospital, she meets and falls in love with elderly plantation owner Big John Cape. When Big John's wife chokes to death during his hospital stay, Margaret reads it as a sign, marrying Big John and moving with him to Rosamond, Miss. After Big John's death, Margaret shocks the traditional community by marrying the gentle patriarch's sadistic yet sexy son, John Buie--because, on her arrival in the South, she saw an ancestral portrait of Civil War hero General John Buie Cape and resolved on the spot that her tale dictated that she carry on the general's line. Dutifully, she bears two children to John Buie: gentle Buie, her soul mate, and the coarse Chappy, whom she can't love. At age 53, after Buie's death from a fall, Margaret descends into a deathlike trance from which she wills herself, years later, to crown her saga by making sure that Cape Plantation is restored to its rightful owner. In part a legal suspense drama, in part an exquisitely nuanced picture of life in the Deep South, Dunbar's debut is above all about the pull of the inner life. (May)