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