The hundred or so characters are firmly presented as types (e.g., "Bartley Paxmore, at thirty-one, was the new-style Quaker"), most of them members of three representative families: the Catholic, landowning, upper-class progeny of Edmund Steed, who explored the Chesapeake with John Smith in 1608 the dumb but spirited lower-class progeny of Timothy Turlock, who came to Maryland as an indentured servant and the steady, middle-class, shipbuilding progeny of Quaker Edmund Paxmore, who was dumped in Maryland in 1661 after extensive Massachusetts whippings. Without the frame or the focus that loosely held Centennial together, this massive but arbitrarily fragmented East-Coast community history-a Maryland island, 1583-1978-is almost devoid of traditional novelistic pleasure.
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