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QUINCY'S HARVEST by Tom H. Forbes

QUINCY'S HARVEST

By

Pub Date: Oct. 15th, 1976
Publisher: Lippincott

When Quincy has a mystical vision, seeing his dead friend Stump ""instantly etched across the mountaintops of my being that I hadn't begun to climb yet,"" we're reminded of William Armstrong's more flagrant stylistic bombs. But there's also a touch of the kind of storytelling power Armstrong can tap at times in this tale of a share-cropper's son who learns trapping from Stump, the one-legged black man who works in Papa's tobacoo fields, and who turns against killing things ""of heat and blood"" after he accidentally catches a blue heron in his muskrat trap. Both Stump and Quincy (who concludes, in so many words, that ""nature and money were enemies"") are less arresting figures than Papa, associated with the smell of gunpowder and carcasses in Quincy's mind, but still able to kill a corn-raiding bear and beg for a bank loan without selling out his humanity. The feeling of bloodied fur and flooded fields and a boy's rebellion against the land is ail there, but their clumsy, self-conscious expression cut their impact by half.