bookpagedev

Biography

The complex world of Aldous Huxley

Review by bookpagedev

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is best known for his classic prescient satirical novel Brave New World, in which leaders maintain their power by thought manipulation. "The Machiavelli of the mid-twentieth century," the author said, "will be an advertising man; his Prince a textbook of the art and science of fooling all the people all the time." That novel was part of a unique literary career that began with poetry, included such acclaimed novels as Antic Hay, Eyeless in Gaza, and Island and explored various scientific and literary subjects, mysticism and mind-altering drugs among other topics, in elegant essays. In addition to authoring more than 50 books, he also wrote for the stage and screen.

Biographer Nicholas Murray traces Huxley’s life and the development of this thought and work in Aldous Huxley: A Biography. Huxley’s personal motto was aun aprendo or "I am always learning," appropriate for the grandson of Victorian scientist Thomas Huxley, a prominent supporter of Charles Darwin. Among his many interests were the environmental movement, nuclear weapons, militarism and ruinous nationalism. When he was 16 years old, Aldous suffered a serious eye infection that rendered him unable to do any reading for almost two years and left him with partial sight for the rest of his life. Murray notes that for Huxley, "It was a catastrophe which he always believed was the single most important determining event in his early life." One of the first wave of those to study the then new discipline of English literature at Oxford, Huxley was drawn to a literary career. He did not consider himself a born novelist. "By profession I am an essayist who sometimes writes novels and biographies, an unsystematic cogitator whose books represent a series of attempts to discover and develop artistic methods for expressing the general in the particular." In the 1930s, he began to be much more concerned with politics, society and the problems of the world.

Murray deftly conveys both Huxley’s outer and inner lives. Early in his career, his friendships included literary figures Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. Later on, his friends were often scientists, physicians and academic specialists in various disciplines. The astronomer Edwin Hubble and his wife Grace were close friends of the Huxleys.

Personally, Huxley was not much interested in practical matters and enjoyed solitude. He was very close to his first wife, Maria, and dependent on her for many things she read books to him and served as his driver. In his later years, he became increasingly drawn to mysticism, but it was not insulated from the real world. He understood mysticism as data, real elements in life, not abstractions.

Murray’s carefully researched biography, including interviews with Huxley’s second wife Laura and son Matthew, gives us a vivid portrait of a complex figure. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a regular contributor to BookPage.

 

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is best known for his classic prescient satirical novel Brave New World, in which leaders maintain their power by thought manipulation. "The Machiavelli of the mid-twentieth century," the author said, "will be an advertising man; his Prince a textbook of the…

Nature

The disappearing Louisiana coast

Review by bookpagedev

Today, as on all other days in Louisiana’s bayou country, 50 acres of land will become water. In 10 months, a land area the size of Manhattan will be a part of the Gulf of Mexico. The main reason: Levees built to control Mississippi River flooding have deprived the wetlands of fresh sediments. In Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast, author Mike Tidwell says nutrient starvation threatens the source of a third of America’s seafood and endangers an entire subculture of America.

Tidwell immerses himself in the Cajun world, with its zesty cooking, toe-tapping music, and ingrained passion for and reliance on hunting, trapping and fishing. Amid new friends who have never flown, owned a credit card or read a book, he finds the soul of bayou life in a shrimper’s observation: “A bayou Cajun man, he loves two t’ings de most in de whole world: bein’ on de water and bein’ wit his family.” Let’s peek as Tidwell visits a tiny, tin-roofed house on stilts: Visitors pass through, each chiming in that the Leeville Bridge is going to be repainted. Everybody asks about the boy born to Tim’s second cousin Nikia across the street. Tim’s nephew comes by to make sure everything’s OK with the new outboard because he’ll be running Tim’s crab traps. Yes, there’s a TV set and it’s on, but it doesn’t stand a chance. Who could possibly follow the banter of a TV quiz show with so many kinfolk coming and going? Tidwell’s writing style makes it easy for readers to feel his new Cajun friends are their friends, too, and to wonder if their way of life must vanish because the rest of the nation doesn’t care enough. An active environmentalist, author of five books and four-time winner of the Lowell Thomas Award, the highest prize in American travel journalism, Tidwell outlines expensive solutions but says the main question is whether sufficient willpower can be mustered to tackle the problem.

Alan Prince is the former travel editor of the Miami Herald.

Today, as on all other days in Louisiana's bayou country, 50 acres of land will become water. In 10 months, a land area the size of Manhattan will be a part of the Gulf of Mexico. The main reason: Levees built to control Mississippi River…
Travel

A final odyssey to Africa

Review by bookpagedev

It should come as no surprise that writer and former hunter James Kilgo, terminally ill, facing that most universal of fears, would leap at the chance to go to Africa as an observer on a big game safari. Literature is filled with stories of what the dark continent does to men and women, from Conrad to Hemingway, from Gordimer to Dinesen. Kilgo was an eager follower in their footsteps, seeking reaffirmation of life, and perhaps redemption. Some people believe there are no coincidences, so maybe some sort of synchronicity was at work when a casual acquaintance asked Kilgo to accompany him on safari. Having fought prostate cancer for almost a decade, the writer’s one regret was that he had never seen Africa. Now, at the age of 58, he immediately accepts the offer. Kilgo’s journey into another world starts from the moment his plane touches down. After dealing with corrupt customs officials, he is on his way into the bush. The safari makes daily hunting forays, for food as well as for trophies: Hippo, leopard, zebra and several kinds of deer none endangered are on the hunting list, as well as that most dangerous of game, the African lion. Though Kilgo has come along merely as a photographer, when he is given the opportunity to stalk the elusive Kudu deer, he wonders if he is up to the same challenge conquered by his literary forebear, Ernest Hemingway.

Colors of Africa is more than a travelogue it is part literary exploration, part personal journey. The hunters’ camp is near the area where missionary David Livingstone died, and the deeply religious Kilgo finds his faith coming into play, whether it be his unease at distributing bags of shoes and crosses to the local population, talking with a Muslim guide named Karim or dealing with the reality of his cancer. An encounter with a lion marries faith with deeper, primal emotions, setting the stage for the Kudu hunt.

James Kilgo, who died in December 2002, was an exceptional, starkly honest writer. This literate, moving, unsentimental book his last will take you to a world you may have only imagined.

It should come as no surprise that writer and former hunter James Kilgo, terminally ill, facing that most universal of fears, would leap at the chance to go to Africa as an observer on a big game safari. Literature is filled with stories of…
Memoir

Battling the Alzheimer’s beast

Review by bookpagedev

<B>Battling the Alzheimer’s beast</B> There may be little grace mined from the back-breaking, ever-shifting process of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s, but searing, sometimes soulful nuggets of epiphany occasionally surface during the process. Novelist Eleanor Cooney has woven keen insights, beloved memories and painful despair into a new memoir, <B>Death in Slow Motion: My Mother’s Descent into Alzheimer’s</B>. This brutally honest chronicle, rich with darkly humorous metaphor, relates the author’s desperate battle to save her mother from "the beast called Alzheimer’s." Cooney’s movable lens of memoir switches between her childhood and adult years, and we come to know her beautiful, brilliant and witty mother, East Coast writer Mary Durant. She "was a racehorse raring to run. She wanted action. She wanted flash and glamour." Complex, charming and gifted, she was also a woman who very much desired and was desired by men. After the heartbreaking early death of her third husband, the love of her life, Durant was profoundly depressed and chronically grieving. This, Cooney believes, was the true fundament of her mother’s disease: "I think grief literally burned out the circuits of my mother’s brain." We travel with Cooney as she navigates, with the dubious help of drugs and alcohol, the rough road deep into Alzheimer’s territory: the stunned initial coping, the difficult but hopeful care-giving and the agonizing realization of defeat ending in a beloved mother’s institutionalization. This is not a self-help book for those dealing with Alzheimer’s, but a truthful portrayal of the dreary and heartbreaking realities of the disease, especially the confusing search for caregiver support and an affordable, compassionate and clean care facility.

Cooney’s memoir does not end in death, but with an affirmation of life. At one point, the nursing facility calls to relate that Mary Durant has been found sharing the bed of a male resident, sleeping soundly and attired only in a shirt. Says the nurse, " . . . they’re adults, and they still have desires." Cooney laughs, giddily exuberant that part of her mother’s organic essence, her physical desire, has resurfaced. Another light still shining, not yet extinguished.

<I>Alison Hood writes from San Rafael, California.</I>

<B>Battling the Alzheimer's beast</B> There may be little grace mined from the back-breaking, ever-shifting process of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer's, but searing, sometimes soulful nuggets of epiphany occasionally surface during the process. Novelist Eleanor Cooney has woven keen insights, beloved memories and…

History

The deadly legacy of the Khmer Rouge

Review by bookpagedev

From 1975 to 1979, the murderous Khmer Rouge regime of dictator Pol Pot was responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians. And according to some historians, the American destabilization of Cambodia was probably the main cause of Pol Pot’s ascent. War can create, as well as eliminate, murderous dictators.

Not all victims were Cambodians. Indeed, some were Americans, and some foreigners suffered a fate worse than death. Before 1975, Frenchman Francois Bizot was arrested by the Communists, imprisoned, interrogated and tortured. Though a scholar of Buddhism and a friend to Cambodia, Bizot was suspected of being a CIA spy. He would ultimately be acquitted of this absurd charge and released. But he would remain in Cambodia to witness the eerie and epochal evacuation of Phnom Penh. His record of this time, The Gate, is a nightmarish indictment of the Pol Pot regime and all false utopias.

Bizot’s prison warden is a man named Douch, who would later oversee the extermination of 16,000 prisoners at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison. Surprisingly, Bizot is sympathetic toward his captor. He records their numerous conversations, in which Douch is portrayed as a wily patriot whose main faults are his fanatical pursuit of justice and his extreme faith in an alien (indeed French) interpretation of revolutionary Marxism. Douch lobbies for Bizot’s freedom, and the two communicate long after the regime’s demise. The book also relates the frantic efforts by the French embassy in Phnom Penh to protect foreign citizens from the Communists’ severe vengeance. Fluent in Khmer, Bizot becomes the embassy’s liaison, and thus is required to make unbearable life-and-death decisions. Even now, Bizot is plagued with remorse over his actions and omissions.

The tale concludes at the Thai-Cambodian border where he and other refugees have been trucked to seek asylum. Here a married Frenchman coldly abandons his Cambodian mistress to her doomed country and, despite Bizot’s pleading, a Eurasian girl is also rebuffed. The ensuing scenes are a heart-wrenching condemnation of the Khmer Rouge and its curiously ostrich-like supporters, among them France and the United States.

Bizot indulges the often unthinking French hatred of Americans and “their irresponsibility, their colossal tactlessness, their inexcusable and false naivetŽ, even their cynicism.” But as these words might suggest, the anger expressed in The Gate is universal and its prose masterful. May it finally bring the Cambodian “sideshow” to center stage. Kenneth Champeon, a Thailand-based writer, is a regular contributor to www.thingsasian.com.

From 1975 to 1979, the murderous Khmer Rouge regime of dictator Pol Pot was responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians. And according to some historians, the American destabilization of Cambodia was probably the main cause of Pol Pot's ascent. War can create, as…
Religion & Spirituality

Spiritualists exposed sort of

Review by bookpagedev

Harry Houdini exposed seances because he felt they gave false hope to grieving survivors, so when that great magician visited the town of Lily Dale in the 1920s, some of the mediums there reportedly closed their doors and went into hiding. The attitude today is very different, as the psychics in the gated 167-acre community 60 miles south of Buffalo, New York, welcome skeptics and believers alike. One of 20,000 recent summer visitors, Christine Wicker, a Dallas Morning News religion reporter, made no attempt to hide her intent to write a book addressing the question: Are spiritualists good people who help others or are they cold-hearted deceivers gulling the weak? The result is the engrossing new book, Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead.

Wicker takes us into the lives of ordinary folks who, aching for word from departed relatives or friends, are willing to accept despite spiritualism’s checkered history of hoaxes and trickery brief messages that clairvoyants claim to have received from those who have “passed over.” No crystal balls, Ouija boards, tea-leaf or palm readings here. Instead, Wicker leads us to lectures, demonstrations and individual sessions conducted by some 36 seemingly sincere clairvoyants. One psychic runs a workshop on spotting angels among earthlings. Another medium, specializing in pets, informs a woman that her deceased dog was angry because her new puppy was using the former’s food bowl. Two of Wicker’s experiences are particularly arresting. During a one-on-one session, she is stunned when she is told things that she insists the medium could not possibly know. At one point, after brief training, she takes the psychic’s role. This, too, yields remarkable results. Did these two episodes convert the author from skeptic to believer? Wicker answers that query in her book a volume that poses tantalizing questions to non-believers who insist the universe operates solely on scientific cause-and-effect principles.

Harry Houdini exposed seances because he felt they gave false hope to grieving survivors, so when that great magician visited the town of Lily Dale in the 1920s, some of the mediums there reportedly closed their doors and went into hiding. The attitude today is…
Sports

An angling adventure

Review by bookpagedev

James Prosek’s gone fishin’ in a big way. But that doesn’t mean he’s divorced himself from reality in favor of pastoral bliss the way fishermen so often do. In Fly-Fishing the 41st: Around the World on the 41st Parallel, the famed fishing writer loops the planet along one of its most interesting latitudinal lines, stopping in Mongolia and Japan, among other places, to find out what’s biting. Prosek’s search for a native trout from the source of the Tigris River takes him into militarized Serbia and war-torn Yugoslavia. The 41st also takes the young writer directly through Paris, where he finds that the Seine River, once too polluted to support life forms of any kind, now lures a quirky subculture of inner-Paris anglers who thanks to recent clean-ups on the river routinely fish there for eel, bream and silure, a catfish-like creature that grows to enormous proportions.

In one of the liveliest passages of Fly-Fishing, the American author pulls up a 50-pound silure to the amusement and applause of a Paris audience, and his photo makes it into the French press along with a story that paints him as a “tourist” catching a “marine monster.” One of the many delights in Prosek’s gem-laden narrative is a cast of characters from the international fraternity of the fishing-obsessed. Here you will meet Johannes Schoffmann, an Austrian baker who spends his spare hours researching the intricacies of trout. Though he is not a trained scientist himself, Schoffmann’s studies are so meticulous and his travels so heroic, he has made himself indispensable to more than one university professor researching trout DNA. Here you will also meet Francois Calmejane, a French tax inspector celebrated for busting big-time tax evaders. When he is not sleuthing tax fraud in his green ostrich leather vest and Holmes-style meerschaum pipe, Calmejane sculpts giant fish and flies out of iron and fishing-related found objects like hooks and spears. Prosek falls in love with Calmejane’s dark, quirky work and buys a giant trout sculpture on his last day in Paris, because, as he tells the artist, he doesn’t have any choice. “I wished more things were so clear in life as a trout stream or good art,” Prosek concludes in one of the verbal jewels that will make this book a hit not only with sport fishermen, but with anyone who likes to read well-written adventure. Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

James Prosek's gone fishin' in a big way. But that doesn't mean he's divorced himself from reality in favor of pastoral bliss the way fishermen so often do. In Fly-Fishing the 41st: Around the World on the 41st Parallel, the famed fishing writer loops the…
Memoir

Revisiting a reckless youth

Review by bookpagedev

The year Kathy Dobie turned 14, she had one thing on her mind: boys. Teenagers, grown men, it didn’t matter. She wanted them all, and she sent the message loud and clear with halter tops and swaying hips.

They took the bait and came running.

In her first book, a memoir called The Only Girl in the Car, Dobie describes the pivotal period in her life when the world of sex opened before her, and she plunged in with abandon. It was a heady time full of experiences far beyond the scope of her proper Catholic family, who didn’t suspect a thing.

Dobie’s upbringing was typical for the 1970s: a suburban Connecticut home, five brothers and sisters, a father who worked while her mother stayed home. Tired of being a dutiful daughter and big sister, Dobie rebelled against the wholesome image. She longed for danger and recklessness, spending her evenings at the smoky teen center, watching the guys play pool and imagining her body pressed up against them. Before long, she wasn’t just imagining.

“As far as I was concerned, I was doing exactly what the boys were doing, which meant I was as alive, as bold, as free, as they were,” she writes.

On an unforgettable March night, riding in a car full of those teen center boys, she got more than she bargained for. The experience resonated far beyond that bitterly cold evening, changing the course of her life forever.

With fresh, lively prose and a thoughtful delivery, Dobie manages to capture the eagerness and childlike trust that led her into danger, and the mental toughness and fortitude that helped her recover. What’s striking about the book is that Dobie, who has written for Harper’s, The Village Voice, Salon and other magazines, delves so honestly and fearlessly into a young girl’s sexual experiences and attitudes. She doesn’t shy away from the image she presents of herself as a reckless, eager teen with no regard for reputation or restraint.

Instead, by telling her story candidly, Dobie captures the complicated reality of a girl who’s impulsive and dreamy, honest and true to a fault. Her memoir ultimately is more than a coming-of-age story. Eloquent and sharp, The Only Girl in the Car is a lyrically rendered, candid book about teenage sexuality, and one girl with enough courage to strike out on her own and keep going. Rebecca Denton is a newspaper reporter who lives in Nashville.

The year Kathy Dobie turned 14, she had one thing on her mind: boys. Teenagers, grown men, it didn't matter. She wanted them all, and she sent the message loud and clear with halter tops and swaying hips.

They took the bait and…
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

A summer camp revolution

Review by bookpagedev

In The Wellstone, a freestanding follow-up to his acclaimed novel The Collapsium, writer and real-life rocket scientist Wil McCarthy considers post-scarcity economies, leadership politics and immortality, all in an adventure novel that would have made Robert A. Heinlein proud.

Prince Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui is the teenage heir to the Queendom of Sol, but, due to his parents’ immortality, he will never inherit it. He is, of course, a polymath genius (his pre-teen poetry is scattered throughout the book), and he is deeply dissatisfied with his lot in life. Sent to summer camp, he foments revolution. The prince’s two main collaborators are smart but impulsive Conrad Mursk and Xiomara (known as Xmary), a “fax” copy of a girl.

In this high-tech Queendom, a fax can reproduce not only material objects, but living creatures as well. Another important new invention is wellstone, a kind of programmable matter that can mimic almost any substance. The fax and wellstone technology is well thought out and described. Additionally, an appendix describes the “Fax Wars,” in which McCarthy explores the (sometimes hilarious) ramifications of replicating devices being made widely available. Despite a wealth of competition from other characters, Conrad is the most interesting person here. Bascal’s breakout forces Conrad to consider not just his actions, but also their possible consequences. Watching him come to life as an adult, realizing and working around his own faults not to mention the difficulties thrown in the revolutionaries’ path is a treat worth the price of the book. Gavin J. Grant writes from Northampton, Massachusetts.

In The Wellstone, a freestanding follow-up to his acclaimed novel The Collapsium, writer and real-life rocket scientist Wil McCarthy considers post-scarcity economies, leadership politics and immortality, all in an adventure novel that would have made Robert A. Heinlein proud.

Prince Bascal Edward de…
FictionWomen's Fiction

Looking for love in the book biz

Review by bookpagedev

Some girls live on cigarettes, booze, heartbreak and petty disasters, until fate turns their lifetime of humiliation into a fairy tale ending. At least, that’s how it is for a certain brand of English anti-heroine, made popular by chick-lit star Bridget Jones. Now, there’s the charming and sometimes exasperating Grace Armiger in Wendy Holden’s latest novel, Gossip Hound. In this outing, Holden (Farm Fatale, Simply Divine, Bad Heir Day) skewers the British book publishing biz, lining up London tabloid journalism in her sights as well.

Grace, daughter of aristocratic career diplomats, is ensconced in the PR department at Hatto ∧ Hatto, a rarified London literary publisher. Her days are filled with the dubious challenge of rousing interest from absolutely anyone in her obscure, eccentric authors. She stumbles through publicity plans for these would-bes and has-beens, even stooping to a booze-fueled pity shag with Henry, an attractive adventurer and author of a worthy memoir that tanks despite her best efforts. Grace feels as chewed up as Hatto, the only publishing house proud to be without a bestseller ever and going down the toilet with elitist Žlan.

Equally damaging to personal growth is Grace’s grubby, leftist boyfriend who drags her to “bucket rattlings” and rants about Grace’s “exploitation” of her well-paid Eastern European maid Maria. Meanwhile, vicious and gorgeous Belinda Black, hack London columnist with a heart of coal, will stop at nothing to steal a fellow journalist’s celebrity profiles job. After putting her rival in the hospital and pissing off the paper with libelous lies about an A-list British starlet, Belinda decides the hot American actor Red Campion is her next worthy target. And if he won’t say yes, she’ll stalk him.

As these two sink to all-time professional lows Grace with touching ineptitude and Belinda with the focus of a Scud missile it’s clear their paths will cross with a vengeance. But before the shoe drops, Grace meets an American multimedia mogul who becomes, along with deus ex machina Maria, a central figure in the revival of her shaky career and love life.

The plot takes a while to warm up, but eventually pays off, especially when taking on London media pretensions and the heart-stopping confusions of romance. Gossip Hound is a softly satirical story that rolls along on the strength of appealing characters and wry humor, rather than one-liners.

Some girls live on cigarettes, booze, heartbreak and petty disasters, until fate turns their lifetime of humiliation into a fairy tale ending. At least, that's how it is for a certain brand of English anti-heroine, made popular by chick-lit star Bridget Jones. Now, there's the…
Fiction

When fate throws a curveball

Review by bookpagedev

Dennis Birch’s life has taken an unsettling turn. As a Spanish-speaking baseball scout somewhere in Latin America, working for an unnamed major-league team, his future seems bleak. So when he is offered an opportunity that could be dangerous but extremely beneficial to his career, he is quick to take it. All he has to do is to fly to Cuba and help a phenomenal young pitcher named Ramon Diego Sagasta defect. While Birch’s mission seems simple enough, the environment of Castro’s Cuba has a way of undoing the best ideas. Rather than the boisterous atmosphere of modern-day Havana, Birch finds himself in a small, dingy room in a small, dirty town full of suspicious people. The simple plan goes awry when Birch, in a false attempt at macho bravado, insults his young charge and receives in reply a piece of fruit hurled at fastball speed. When he awakens, he realizes that he and the young pitching phenom have literally missed the boat. Birch attempts to set things right, but as his understanding of his companion increases, he finds his priorities shifting. Things are starting to get really dangerous.

First-time novelist Brian Shawver has an easy way with language, and his descriptions can conjure up both revulsion, in the person of Charlie Dance an obese, obscene excuse of a man who gives Birch his marching orders and poignancy, as the narrator watches Sagasta’s last meal with his family. The plotting is crisp and quick, and the surprise ending will confound most readers’ expectations.

The Cuban Prospect is, ultimately, a compelling look at the human condition. It is about the ways we treat each other, both cruelly and humanely; the depths we go to and the sacrifices we are willing to make to get what we want; and how we all manage to achieve our own personal redemption. James Neal Webb can’t wait for spring training to start.

Dennis Birch's life has taken an unsettling turn. As a Spanish-speaking baseball scout somewhere in Latin America, working for an unnamed major-league team, his future seems bleak. So when he is offered an opportunity that could be dangerous but extremely beneficial to his career, he…
FictionWomen's Fiction

The books that bind

Review by bookpagedev

Forced outdoors by cabin fever during a spring snowstorm, five suburban women plunge into a spontaneous evening snowball fight. When they come inside later to warm up, a remarkable set of friendships is launched one that will span 30 years and three tumultuous decades of social change.

As in previous bestsellers such as Patty Jane’s House of Curl and The Great Mysterious, Lorna Landvik sets her fifth novel in her native small-town Minnesota, where she meticulously chronicles the activities of the Freesia Court Book Club and the lives of its five members: Faith, Audrey, Merit, Slip and Kari (as in car, not care). The book club is not-so-lovingly renamed Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons by Merit’s husband, who is jealous of her friendship with the other women. From the spring of 1968 through the fall of 1998, the book club members read selections as eclectic as the women themselves from Soul on Ice to Middlemarch to Stephen King’s The Stand.

Living through the era of the Vietnam war, the protest movement and women’s liberation, the five friends take on such problems as domestic violence, infidelity, homophobia and empty nests, bolstered by the restorative powers of friendship. Landvik looks back at the childhood experiences of the book club members and follows along as they raise children of their own from the annual neighborhood circus through college acceptances and careers, all accompanied by a host of maternal fears and worry. So convincing are the details that readers will try to guess what Audrey might wear to book club meetings and predict what Slip will think of the books. Readers might feel a twinge of sadness and loss as they turn the last page of Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons finishing this book is like leaving five dear friends. Alice Pelland writes from Hillsborough, North Carolina.

Forced outdoors by cabin fever during a spring snowstorm, five suburban women plunge into a spontaneous evening snowball fight. When they come inside later to warm up, a remarkable set of friendships is launched one that will span 30 years and three tumultuous decades of…
Fiction

A love triangle, Southern-style

Review by bookpagedev

In 1961, Halley Martin returns to Homeland, Florida, from prison, after doing 20 years of hard time. His arrival nearly coincides with a fire that destroys the home of Preacher Ned Jeffries, who is severely burned in the blaze.

These two events in Richard Yancey’s impressive debut novel aren’t actually linked, but the men are. Halley (named for the comet) and Preacher Ned share not just an old acquaintance they each harbor an unquenchable passion for Ned’s stunningly beautiful wife, Mavis.

Some 20 years before, Halley rashly committed a murder, apparently on Mavis’ behalf, following an accusation of rape; he was a silent admirer of the young woman, who was the sheltered daughter of a wealthy businessman. Years later, Ned pressed an advantage afforded by financial necessity and managed to convince the mature and desperate Mavis to marry him.

A Burning in Homeland is really a fateful love triangle of a peculiarly Southern variety. Yancey, also an actor and playwright, exhibits a good feel for drama and atmosphere; his imagery is simply splendid. The language is lush, as befits the setting, and the characters often fall victim to their own overwrought emotions as Preacher Ned does during his climactic sermon (or tirade) on the occasion of his homecoming. And, as all the townsfolk expect, there’s an inevitable march toward what Halley calls a “reckoning” between himself and the preacher.

But, also true to form, and to Richard Yancey’s credit, the final confrontation demonstrates that there can be no making up for lost time or missed chances, no redeeming act of vengeance in answer to a perceived betrayal. There may only be tragic mistakes.

Mavis remarks to Halley that life is a compromise between necessity and desire. It’s a simple and obvious truth, but, in his first novel, Yancey refreshes it with insight and vigor. Harold Parker writes from Gallatin, Tennessee.

In 1961, Halley Martin returns to Homeland, Florida, from prison, after doing 20 years of hard time. His arrival nearly coincides with a fire that destroys the home of Preacher Ned Jeffries, who is severely burned in the blaze.

These two events in…

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features