A CURIOUS MATTER OF MEN WITH WINGS

Name: A CURIOUS MATTER OF MEN WITH WINGS
Author: F. Rutledge Hammes
ISBN: 978-1-7325398-2-2

by F. Rutledge Hammes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 2018

A promising beginning. Readers with an interest in folklore, fantasy, and Southern letters alike will find this a treat.

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Magical realism comes to the Carolina Lowcountry in this quietly elegant debut novel by Hammes (Director, Creative Writing Program/Charleston County School of the Arts).

The “men with wings” of the title is no metaphor: There are men with wings flying about, “flocks of winged men in the sky,” and they’re not angels—even if, as we learn, they helped enslaved African people escape from the rice fields of the South Carolina coast and make their way north, and they continue to help by showing where game is hiding and where wells should be dug. One white family, the Walpoles, lives among the Gullah people, and when their daughter disappears in a moment worthy of The Secret of Roan Inish, that family begins to fall to pieces. It’s the girl’s brothers, Bohicket and Ley, who try to hold things together, meanwhile hatching plots of their own to find young Dew: “Had she drowned? They couldn’t say. Or had she been kidnapped by those, uh…creatures in the sky?” Revenge will be theirs, if only they can find the answer and maybe castrate the evildoers—and if Dew in fact survived the tumble from their johnboat into the waves. The search for Dew frames much of the story, but the real virtues of this well-spun yarn are its portrayal of the dynamic of a decidedly eccentric family and revealing look inside the little-known world of the island people, whose folk beliefs date back many centuries and prove to be of help in the Walpoles’ travails. Hammes often writes with a poet’s touch (“He just stood there aghast, quietly staring down at the question-mark shape of this last and final answer”), and if the story wanders into increasingly improbable territory, it’s one for which readers will gladly suspend disbelief.

A promising beginning. Readers with an interest in folklore, fantasy, and Southern letters alike will find this a treat.

Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-7325398-2-2

Page Count: 288

Publisher: SFK Press

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2018

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.