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    Quicksand
    Quicksand
    Quicksand
    Audiobook4 hours

    Quicksand

    Written by Nella Larsen

    Narrated by Christine Glassman

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Nella Larsen's first novel tells the story of Helga Crane, a fictional character loosely based on Larsen's own early life. Crane is the lovely and refined daughter of a Danish mother and a West Indian black father who abandons Helga and her mother soon after Helga is born. Unable to feel comfortable with any of her white-skinned relatives, Helga lives in various places in America and visits Denmark in search of people among whom she feels at home. The work is a superb psychological study of a complicated and appealing woman, Helga Crane, who, like Larsen herself, is the product of a liaison between a black man and a white woman. In one sense, Quicksand might be called an odyssey; however, instead of overcoming a series of obstacles and finally arriving at her native land, Larsen's protagonist has a series of adventures, each of which ends in disappointment.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHN Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2018
    ISBN9781509494163
    Author

    Nella Larsen

    Nella Larsen was born in Chicago in 1891 to a white Danish mother and a black West Indian father. She studied in America and Denmark and throughout her writing career she worked as a children’s librarian and primarily as a nurse. In 1928 her first novel Quicksand was published to great critical acclaim. Passing was published a year later. Her marriage to Dr Elmer Imes brought her into contact with the upper echelons of New York’s black society and she became an important female voice of the Harlem Renaissance. She was the first black woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing. Divorced in 1933, she spent the rest of her life working as nurse. Nella Larsen died in 1964.

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    Reviews for Quicksand

    3.5/5

    30 ratings3 reviews

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    • 2/5
      The narrator mispronounces a lot of words and sometimes she says a completely wrong word that isn't in the original text. At one point she said "carefulness" instead of "carelessness," which has the opposite meaning of what the author intended in that line. She also said "lass" instead of "kiss" several times, "wash" instead of "wish," which would have been confusing had I not been reading along. Her tone/ emphasis isn't great, especially when she reads dialogue, making for a pretty dull listening experience.
    • 3/5
      An interesting and educational read. Hard to like the main character though and hard to understand her choices. Like most of us, she was her own worst enemy but who can understand another's motivation?
    • 1/5
      The narrator of this is awful! She puts emphasis at all the wrong points in sentences. What a shame after the narrator of Passing by Nella Larson was so good! I struggled through the 1st few chapters of this narrator before switching to listening to it for free on the Librivox app.