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THE FAIRBROTHERS by Clark McMeekin

THE FAIRBROTHERS

By

Publisher: Putnam

The writing team known to the trade as ""Clark McMeekin"" have done it again in a winning family saga of Kentucky, between the Civil War and the running of the first Kentucky Derby. Here is the predictable feels and scent and sound and look of the state they know so well; here the nostalgic echo of times past and of mores that survive; here the matriarch portrait in Miss Kizzie, who found it hard to let go the apron strings; the gentle, fading, protective Major Fairbrother, who sought solitude and escape from memory in his cabin; Tolley, the second son who never was able to forget that Brace was the one his mother had wanted back; Laban, coltlike youngster -- and Zion, who came under false colors -- disrupted the whole family -- and stayed to become flesh of their flesh. The story actually revolves around Zion -- and the mare, Gunny -- but there are many threads to the plot and the reader loses herself in the interplay of characters, as though taken into the heart of the family in the process. Perhaps no original note is struck here- but the whole makes for pleasant entertainment, a translation briefly into other times.