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Kind One
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan, Robin Miles
- Length: 4 hrs and 25 mins
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Editor reviews
A meditation on cruelty, slavery, and memory in Antebellum south, Laird Hunt’s Kind One follows Ginny Lancaster who leaves Indiana to live with her new husband, Linus, in Kentucky. Linus turns out to be a brutal man, beating and raping Ginny and their two slave girls. Already wishing she’d never left her family home, she learns a whole new perspective on servitude when Linus dies, leaving her alone with the girls. The audiobook jumps around in time from the early 1800s through the early 1900s, with Robin Miles setting a pensive sorrowful tone of an old woman looking back and the young woman she was making painful discoveries. Nick Sullivan performs the opening and ending pieces, bookending the piece chronologically and emotionally.
Summary
As a teenage girl, Ginny marries Linus Lancaster, her mother's second cousin, and moves to his Kentucky pig farm "ninety miles from nowhere." In the shadows of the lush Kentucky landscape, Ginny discovers the empty promises of Linus' "paradise" - a place where the charms of her husband fall away to reveal a troubled man and cruel slave owner. Ginny befriends the young slaves Cleome and Zinnia who work at the farm - until Linus' attentions turn to them, and she finds herself torn between her husband and only companions. The events that follow Linus' death change all three women for life.
Haunting, chilling, and suspenseful, Kind One. is a powerful tale of redemption and human endurance in antebellum America.
Laird Hunt is the author of several works of fiction and a finalist for the 2010 PEN Center USA Award in Fiction. Currently on the faculty of the University of Denver's creative writing program, he and his wife, the poet Eleni Sikelianos, live in Boulder, Colorado, with their daughter, Eva Grace.