Esther: A Novel in Verse

Critic Reviews

Family is destiny in Pam Bernard’s brilliantly accomplished verse novel. Westward settlement in the early years of the twentieth century, rendered in lush and startling detail, is yoked to the brokenness at the core of Esther’s family. In verse as finely attuned to the measure of the line as it is to layers of meaning, Bernard makes manifest a time, a place, and a woman, and sheds new light on the darkness that gets handed down from one generation to the next. Esther is a wrenching and exhilarating experience: no reader will remain unchanged.
— Jennifer Barber, author of Given Away, Kore Press

In the early 1900s, traveling from Kansas to California, across prairie and plains, desert and mountains, Esther’s journey is an odyssey of the spirit, a journey toward self-knowledge and survival. In this brilliant novel in verse, Pam Bernard perfectly blends poetic language, imagination, and research to create a work of stunning achievement, where each character is drawn spare and sharp, each event becomes metaphor. Yet the landscape is perhaps the strongest character of all – save, Esther herself, whose strength in the face of abuse, grief, and loneliness will leave an indelible mark on your own spirit.
— Patricia Fargnoli, author of Winter, Hobblebush Books