DUE EAST

by Valerie Sayers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 20, 1986

An immediately appealing first novel centered on the sourly-comic-to-sadly-revelatory excitements surrounding the pregnancy of a 15-year-old high-school girl in the small South Carolina town of Due East. Mary Faith Rapple has been housekeeping for her father Jesse, owner of the Plaid King gas station, who'd raised her alone for the three years since the death by cancer of his wife Faith, when Mary Faith got pregnant. He wouldn't believe it was a virgin birth either, but Mary Faith thought it was easier for Jesse to explain to his friends that she was crazy than to know that the baby's father was dead of 30 Quaaludes in front of the downtown movie theater. Jesse, devastated, sets off to find the father--he's sure it's teacher Stephen Dugan, who takes Mary Faith to tutoring sessions (she's a prize student helping high-school dropouts in the evenings). But Jesse--all mixed-up and afraid--runs aground at the apartment of Stephen's widowed mother Nell, who's skinny and wrinkled and lusty--and it's beer and sex time. While others work on plans to take care of the pregnancy, both Mary Faith--who's determined to have the baby--and Jesse--who's so wracked by fear and guilt that he stays away from home--try for a way out: Jesse wants to marry Nell (whom he inexplicably gets pregnant) and make a new home; Mary Faith falls in love with Stephen, who's married unhappily. Meanwhile, Mary Faith doesn't think much about Michael, the father of the baby, but his parents want to adopt her and the baby. Gradually, after the muddled love of father and daughter (still tethered in a love/hate relationship to the dead Faith); mean vibrations from unhappy, burdensome lives all around; Jesse's near--death; and Mary Faith's agonizing birthing, the new family of three settles in-with no discernible way out--as dead wife/mother Faith comes home to stay in Mary Faith's ""gray eyes, set lips, weary shoulders."" Regionally on pitch, an intimately told tale of home loves and entrapments with a tangle of zesty Due Eastians--including determinedly unsinkable Mary Faith, who, however, will take that Greyhound out of town.

Pub Date: Feb. 20, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION