A haunting, slow-burn intergenerational family saga.
Hunter offers a debut historical novel about three women’s difficult lives in rural 20th-century Appalachia.
In Covington, Virginia, in 1923, 13-year-old Mona Parsons, a willful child of a local family, is lured away from town by Jackson Slocomb, a predator from Pennsylvania who takes her to North Carolina. Jackson scars her face, rapes her, and gets her pregnant, but a Cherokee farmer named Tall Corn takes her away from him. She becomes Tall Corn’s wife and is renamed Two Tears. With the help of her mother-in-law, a healer and sage named Beloved Mother, she gives birth to a son, Briar. Tall Corn raises the boy as his own for 10 years while Beloved Mother trains Two Tears as her replacement. But when Tall Corn dies from an accidental leg wound, Beloved Mother curses her white in-laws and drives them from their land. Later, Anna Parsons, Mona’s younger sister, runs off with a man named Clint Goodman who promises to take her to a city. They end up in the Breakline mining camp near the Kentucky border, where she meets a Cherokee midwife named Granny Slocomb who’s related to Jackson. Anna has a baby as the result of an affair with the mining supervisor and names her Lily Marie Goodman. As the years pass, the histories of these women become progressively intertwined, and the tragedies of the Cherokee people assert themselves in their lives. Hunter’s prose is lyrical and provides frequent, vivid asides about the nature spirits of Cherokee mythology: “Ordinary June days in Carolina gather enough heat to tassel corn, but Sister Sun cannot convince the ground to hold her warmth this season. And Great Spirit is not cooperating, so she drags a dingy anvil shaped cloud over her face and sulks.” The novel’s plot builds very slowly, with its quiet storylines gradually unfolding over the course of hundreds of pages. The payoffs take a long time to arrive, and don’t always satisfy, when they finally do. However, the story finds its strength in its myth-infused setting, where curses and destinies seem to loom in every shadow.
A haunting, slow-burn intergenerational family saga.Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-934610-98-5
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Bluewater Publications
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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