Product Description

Chloe Dale’s life is in good order. Her only child, Toby, has started his junior year at New York University; her husband, an academic on sabbatical, is working at home on his book about the Crusades; and Chloe is busy creating illustrations for a special edition of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Yet Chloe is disturbed—by the aggression of her government’s foreign policy, by the poacher who roams the land behind her studio punctuating her solitude with rifle fire, and finally, by Toby’s new girlfriend, a Croatian refugee named Salome Drago.
Raised in the Croatian expatriate community of New Orleans, Salome is a toxic mix of the old world and the new: intelligent, superstitious, sly, seductive, and confident. But Salome’s past is a mine of dangerous secrets, and the violence that destroyed her homeland is far from over. Chloe distrusts her on sight, and as Toby’s obsession with Salome grows, Chloe’s mistrust deepens, alienating her from her tolerant husband and besotted son. Rich with menace, the novel unfolds in a world where darkness intrudes into bright and pleasant places, a world with betrayal at its heart. In shimmering prose Valerie Martin raises the question: who shall inherit America?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #173885 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-18
• Released on: 2007-09-18
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This thought-provoking novel by Orange Prize–winning Martin (for Property) opens deceptively, as the quiet story of a mother slowly adjusting to her 21-year-old son becoming an adult. In 2002, Chloe Dane is a loving mother and wife, an artist engrossed in illustrating a new edition of Wuthering Heights and a protestor against the imminent invasion of Iraq. Her husband, Brendan, is a historian who doubts that his work has any value but is generally self-satisfied. When their only child, Toby, a junior at NYU, gets Salome Drago, his Croatian immigrant girlfriend, pregnant and hastily marries her, Chloe fears he was trapped by a calculating woman more interested in Toby's family's impressive house and property than in Toby. When Salome learns her mother, Jelena, whom she believed was killed by Serbs, is alive, she traces her to Trieste and abruptly departs to find her. Toby follows, and when the newlyweds decide to drop out of college and remain in Italy, Chloe sends Brendan to bring Toby home. A tragedy—one very convenient for the narrative—strikes while Brendan's in Italy, paving the way for a startlingly light resolution. Forgiveness doesn't come easy for the characters as they learn that nothing—not family, borders or survival—is inviolable. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Critics hail Trespass as a "stunning" work (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), with the potential to introduce Valerie Martin (best known for her 2001 novel Mary Reilly) to a wider audience. The novel combines the drama of family relationships with larger themes of xenophobia, war, and genocide; it also juxtaposes the comfort of the American middle class with the horrors suffered by victims of ethnic cleansing in other parts of the world. Although a couple of reviewers found the plot forced at times, most praised Martin for her achievement. Brilliant writing, deftly-drawn characters, and a refusal to provide easy answers make this thought-provoking work a pleasure to read.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
Winner of the Orange Prize for her 2003 novel Property, Martin is a coolly dispassionate storyteller with a narrative voice that is at once inviting and disquieting. Her latest novel opens as Chloe Dale, a book illustrator whose husband, Brendan, is a college history professor, meets the new girlfriend of Toby, their much-loved only child. Salome, a Croatian refugee whose family settled in Louisiana (her father is known as the Oyster King), met Toby at New York University, where he was instantly smitten, not only by her dark good looks but also by her self-assurance, born of shouldering adult responsibilities from a very early age. Chloe, feeling vulnerable and threatened, immediately dislikes Salome, viewing her as something like a predator. At the same time, a poacher, whom Chloe believes is Middle Eastern, is illegally hunting rabbits in the forest behind her studio; the repeated gunfire only adds to the menacing atmosphere that Martin builds ever so slowly and skillfully. And cutting through the family drama is the voice, rendered in italics, of an unidentified speaker who deliberately if numbly recounts the numerous unimaginable atrocities that occurred on a daily basis in Croatia, forcing Salome's family to flee. Such horrific scenes are frequently juxtaposed, to chilling effect, with those depicting the Dales' comfortable lifestyle. Although her plot takes some erratic turns, Martin effectively frames the immigration debate, implying that even the most well-meaning Americans lack all context for fully understanding, and therefore empathizing with, those for whom survival itself is viewed as something like a miracle. Wilkinson, Joanne

Customer Reviews

3.5 -- Could have been a great book
This is an interesting book with an interesting plot and characters. I liked Valerie Martin's writing style and her attention to details in creating the characters and their relationships. All these factors could have made it a great book if the author had avoided the abrupt twist in the story towards the last quarter of the book. The story thereafter appeared only fabricated to meet a certain, pre-determined climax. It was very disappointing to read the last 70 or so pages. It felt like a great plot and characters were wasted down the drain. Inspite of this disappointment, I have given a 3.5 star rating to this book b'coz of its first half and the author's writing style. I will definitely look out for more books from her -- hoping that she wouldn't disappoint me again.

Brilliant in the early going, disappointing at the end
The principle plot points of this book set the stage for all forms of intrusion and encroachment. A new character in a family's life threatens to change everything, a strange man hunting on private property lays a foundation of menace, and the characters collectively react by trying to protect what belongs to them, what feels like the established order of their lives. The tension and vague sense of danger that pervades the first two-thirds of the book had me turning pages, eager to get to the next development.

The removal of a central character in this novel ruins everything. The tension drains from the story like air from a punctured balloon. Thereafter, the plot drifts, story lines are left to wither, and the entire exercise feels a bit futile. The book is nicely written, but I can't help but think the energy and mood of the first two-thirds could have carried through to some pivotal confrontation and then, perhaps, to a discernible point.

hello? ( spoiler alert )
This is more a reaction to the publisher's description, the blurb on the back of the recording I listened to, and the reviewer above who says only poor Chloe fails to assimilate. "How can a mother's love compete with the horrors of Bosnia and an intuitive understanding on Salome's part that the world gives you nothing if you don't take it for yourself."

Can we talk about accepting the mother's position that this is a competition? Or skipping over the "salting the relationship between girlfriend and SON with distrust and competition" that is the foundation of every word Chloe ever says to or about her son?

Chloe is defined not by maternal love but by suspicion and possessiveness. The arrogant pride and fear of a priviledged, willfully ignorant, classist american woman with huge unquestioned boundary issues are to be
compared sympathetically to the 'grasping ambitions' of a young immigrant? Um, because the girl is sexy and intelligent, or because she was shaped by a history of real rather than imagined danger?

Nothing about Chloe's 'love' for her son includes respecting him, his judgements, his emotions or his vision of personal integrity. She does not trust her son enough to let him experience consequence and grow, and she takes no responsibility for the effect of her own lack of character on the lives of those she says she loves.

The only redeeming thing about Chloe is her grasp of Wuthering Heights. Would that she could have seen her own self-defeating passions as clearly. She is a monster of selfishness, projecting monstrousness onto everyone who challenges her need to be in control and beyond criticism. She is not Heathcliff, but Cathy.

This is an idea-driven novel, and the characters' lack of appeal cited by other reviewers may come from their being primarily clothing draped over a series of moral and historical viewpoints. The author's solution to Chloe's incapacity for change, however, seems like a lazy manuever on the way to a truly pat ending. On the other hand - Hamlet hesitated to dispatch a villian before he had a chance to repent; Ms. Martin does not. Perhaps in addition to being an expedient abandonment of her character, this is an equally heavy-handed last judgement of her as well.