A thriller that’s as Georgian as peach pie, with a darkness that creeps like kudzu.
A supernatural Southern novel that drawls through a story of bluegrass mythology and race relations.
Thornhorn’s (The Kudzu Man, 2013, etc.) dialect-heavy novel follows the Brothers Brass, psalm singers turned bluegrass pickers, from their youth through their demon-haunted coming-of-age. Their mother, Georgiana, against the wishes of their father, Malakoff, sends them to Shelfy Oak Bible College, where Kestrel is saved from drowning by Bettilia Whissler. From their first meeting, Bettilia hides behind a veil of mystery, specifically concealing the circumstances of a family member’s death. When Kestrel injures himself falling from a tree, Bettilia comes back with him to Angelsprey, the Brass family homestead. It’s here that the first hints of the supernatural enter the narrative: Bettilia reveals that she killed her father, but then intimates that he continues to look for her, despite the railway spike she dropped on his head. That’s why, after she performs at the fair with the Brothers Brass, she decides to lay low. She senses evil afoot, and Malakoff seems to reckon it too. It isn’t until Kestrel and Bettilia’s wedding day that the true danger appears—a devil in hobnailed boots that will change Kestrel’s and Bettilia’s life forever. The novel burns slow, and throughout its first half, conflict appears mainly in the form of family struggles, or from dark figures lurking at the periphery. Despite the Brothers’ fairly liberal stance on race relations for Southerners in the early 1960s, the novel does tread a controversial path: Many of its black characters have an exotic, otherworldly presence, and only these characters (and white Bettilia) seem to have access to the supernatural realm. The author undoubtedly means to do justice to local mythologies and to the attitudes of the segregated South; perhaps this is echoed in the Brothers’ own “slang-powered rebellion, an openly sly subversion of their mother’s polite society.” Throughout, Thornhorn’s mellifluous, lyrical sentences will keep the reader occupied: “At the end of that long and meandering mud rut was an ungated gap in a kudzu-choked fence, and beyond that was an open field where sunlight was very unkind to the house that lay there sinking into the ground.”
A thriller that’s as Georgian as peach pie, with a darkness that creeps like kudzu.Pub Date: March 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615967462
Page Count: 570
Publisher: Rosasharn Press
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.
Walker (In Love and Trouble, Meridian) has set herself the task of an epistolary novel—and she scores strongly with it.
The time is in the Thirties; a young, black, Southern woman named Celie is the primary correspondent (God being her usual addressee); and the life described in her letters is one of almost impossible grimness. While young, Celie is raped by a stepfather. (Even worse, she believes him to be her real father.) She's made to bear two children that are then taken away from her. She's married off without her consent to an older man, Albert, who'd rather have Celie's sister Nettie—and, by sacrificing her body to Albert without love or feeling, Celie saves her sister, making it possible for her to escape: soon Nettle goes to Africa to work as a Christian missionary. Eventually, then, halfway through the book, as Celie's sub-literate dialect letters to God continue to mount (eventually achieving the naturalness and intensity of music, equal in beauty to Eudora Welty's early dialect stories), letters from Nettie in Africa begin to arrive. But Celie doesn't see them—because Albert holds them back from her. And it's only when Celie finds an unlikely redeemer—Albert's blues-singer lover Shug Avery—that her isolation ends: Shug takes Celie under her wing, becomes Celie's lover as well as Albert's; Shug's strength and expansiveness and wisdom finally free up Nettie's letters—thus granting poor Celie a tangible life in the now (Shug's love, encouragement) as well as a family life, a past (Nettie's letters). Walker fashions this book beautifully—with each of Celie's letters slowly adding to her independence (the implicit feminism won't surprise Walker's readers), with each letter deepening the rich, almost folk-tale-ish sense of story here. And, like an inverted pyramid, the novel thus builds itself up broadeningly while balanced on the frailest imaginable single point: the indestructibility—and battered-ness—of love.
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.Pub Date: June 28, 1982
ISBN: 0151191549
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
A fat pancake of a novel, the author's second hardcover production tells the life story of one Ruby Blue—from an abused childhood and youth, to years as wife of a Marine, personal liberation, life in the world of industry, and her golden years in a rural retreat. Throughout the career of Ruby Blue, monster men abound. There's Papa George in their Pennsylvania home, a slasher, smacker, and wife beater, who requires that his daughters repay him, in bucks, for the cost of raising them. Then there's Ruby's husband, Andrew (met in those WW II glory days in D.C.), who is heavy on the verbal abuse and generally amoral. Ruby's lifelong friend Dixie is regularly slugged mercilessly by husband Hugo. Ruby's longtime true love, Calvin, is a gentle soul, but his wife, Eva, is as lethal as the men; fortunately for Calvin, she lacks the biceps. Ruby weathers life with Andrew at Marine bases and puts up with his callous treatment of their two children, but after Andrew admits to having gambled away their son's college money she finally decamps to New Jersey. Ruby soldiers on with Dixie, and their kitchen cookie business goes international in no time. As for the men, they'll get theirs: Papa George is Bobbittized with scalding grape jelly; the late Hugo's ashes get lost in traffic; and Ruby dumps Calvin. But Andrew sees the light. Glop. However, bear in mind the author's smashing success in paperback, including her Texas saga (5 million sold).
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-345-36774-X
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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