Tim Davis

Fiction

Revealing the power of storytelling

Review by Tim Davis

Jack O'Connell's new novel, The Resurrectionist, invites readers to willingly suspend their disbelief as they are drawn into a world dominated by terror and tragedy, fantasy and reality, and hopes and dreams. Upon entering the novel's paradoxical world, readers are introduced to Sweeney, a widowed father from Cleveland, and Danny, Sweeney's six-year-old son, who languishes in a coma following an unspecified accident. Newly arrived at the Peck Clinic near Quinsigamond in Massachusetts, Danny—as patient—and Sweeney—as the clinic's newly hired pharmacist—are relying upon the clinic's extraordinary claims that doctors there have successfully used experimental therapies to "resurrect" patients who had previously been lost within the unfathomable oblivion of comas.

As readers are introduced to a singular assortment of people at the clinic (obsessive neurologists, cunning nurses and strangely preoccupied staffers) as well as those beyond its walls (including a terrifying motorcycle gang whose mind-boggling preoccupations are sinister, brutal and—surprisingly—redemptive), Danny's guilt-burdened father soon begins to realize that the only hope for his son's recovery may lie within Limbo, a fantasy comic book world into which Danny had been drawn at the time of his mysterious accident.

In a risky but brilliantly successful narrative strategy, O'Connell deftly weaves together several plotlines—the story of Sweeney and Danny at the clinic, the story of the doctors who own the clinic, the story of the outlaw bikers and, most audaciously, the mesmerizing story of a troupe of wandering circus freaks. With four superb books already to his credit—The Skin Palace, Word Made Flesh, Wireless and Box Nine—O'Connell has boldly entered exciting new territory with The Resurrectionist, a remarkable novel that is hilarious, baffling, terrifying and reassuring. O'Connell adroitly blurs the not-so-clear boundaries between fiction and real life, inviting readers to re-examine the often ineffable power of myth, fantasy and stories.

Tim Davis writes from the Gulf Coast of Alabama.

Jack O'Connell's new novel, The Resurrectionist, invites readers to willingly suspend their disbelief as they are drawn into a world dominated by terror and tragedy, fantasy and reality, and hopes and dreams. Upon entering the novel's paradoxical world, readers are introduced to Sweeney, a widowed…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Shakespeare’s greatest secret

Review by Tim Davis

When fire damages the new Globe Theatre in London and disrupts rehearsals for Hamlet, young American director Kate Shelton finds herself enmeshed in a malignant drama of staggering proportions in Jennifer Lee Carrell's first novel, Interred with Their Bones. Just prior to the fire, Shakespearean scholar Rosalind Howard had given Kate an enigmatic gift in a small box, and she included this cryptic admonition: If you open it, you must follow where it leads. Then Rosalind is brutally murdered precisely in the manner of Hamlet's father. As the police look into Rosalind's bizarre death, Kate realizes that the box's contents a Victorian mourning brooch may be the most important bit of evidence. Following Rosalind's injunction, Kate takes it upon herself to find her friend's killer.

Kate is immediately confronted by a series of ever-increasing dangers, but she soon discovers to her surprise that she is not alone in her quest for the truth. Ben Pearl, Rosalind's strikingly good-looking nephew, turns up in the nick of time and becomes an indispensable friend and ally.

Piecing together an elaborate puzzle, Kate and Ben travel around the world to Harvard and the American southwest in pursuit of a tantalizing series of literary clues hidden in the words of Shakespeare, Cervantes, the Holy Bible and ciphered texts that will lead them to the murderer and unlock one of history's greatest literary secrets. Taking her title from Mark Antony's ironic eulogy in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Carrell, the author of the much-praised nonfiction book The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox, has proven that she knows how to write a fast-paced, highly entertaining novel. Erudite and complex, Interred with Their Bones draws readers into an allusive labyrinth embellished with the words and plots from the plays of the upstart Crow, as one contemporary dubbed the Bard. Here is a novel that will appeal to mystery-thriller fans as well as Shakespeare aficionados.

Tim Davis teaches literature at the University of West Florida.

When fire damages the new Globe Theatre in London and disrupts rehearsals for Hamlet, young American director Kate Shelton finds herself enmeshed in a malignant drama of staggering proportions in Jennifer Lee Carrell's first novel, Interred with Their Bones. Just prior to the fire, Shakespearean…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Frazier’s remembrance of things past

Review by Tim Davis

Meet Will Cooper, a singular fellow whose life began in early 19th-century America. He was indentured as a 12-year-old orphan to work at an isolated trading post in the southern Appalachians, where a land-hungry America was fast encroaching upon the world of the Cherokees. Throughout his life, Will a voracious reader especially fond of tales of chivalry amassed adventures that would have impressed even Sir Thomas Malory and Sir Walter Scott. In fact, the indefatigable Will became famous as a senator and a colonel in the War. And, most romantically, white chief of the Indians. Now in his 90s, Will knows that he is leaving soon for the Nightland, where all the ghosts of men and animals yearn to travel. And with time running out, Will understands memory as now being about the only intoxicant left in his long and remarkable life.

Thirteen Moons, Charles Frazier's powerful, lyrical second novel (after the National Book Award-winning Cold Mountain), is an extended dramatic monologue in which Will remembers the saga of his life. As we immerse ourselves in Frazier's mellifluous prose, we meet among dozens of fascinating characters the man known as Bear, Will's adoptive father and the loquacious chief of the Cherokees, a damaged people living in a broken world like everybody else. We also meet Claire, the provocative, elusive adolescent beauty who would forever be the unattainable Guinevere to Will's devoted Lancelot. Reading Thirteen Moons is an intoxicating experience in which the author invites us to take a different view of America's transition from the romantic 19th century to the modern 20th century. This is not an elegiac, Proustian remembrance of the past. Instead, we must uncomfortably acknowledge the disturbing ways in which so-called progress has forever altered important parts of the American cultural landscape. This is 21st-century literary fiction at its very best.

Tim Davis is a literature instructor at the University of West Florida.

Meet Will Cooper, a singular fellow whose life began in early 19th-century America. He was indentured as a 12-year-old orphan to work at an isolated trading post in the southern Appalachians, where a land-hungry America was fast encroaching upon the world of the Cherokees. Throughout…

Fiction

Between, Georgia

Review by Tim Davis

Every now and then a remarkable writer, following in the footsteps of great authors, comes along to re-energize American fiction. So it is with Joshilyn Jackson. Unmistakably influenced by three of America's pre-eminent Southern storytellers Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor Jackson, the author of gods in Alabama, now offers readers Between, Georgia, one of this decade's most commendable novels.

The action begins where else? in Between, Georgia, where the long-simmering feud between the expansive Crabtree and the resilient Frett families frequently disturbs the peace in the tiny town populated by fewer than a hundred people. The respectable Fretts have traditionally enjoyed rather secure lives as royal fish in the tiniest of ponds. On the other hand, the wary Crabtrees have long been viewed by the Fretts as squalid types who have fed along the bottom and spread illegitimately like kudzu. The one person who can now either exacerbate or mitigate the war that would tear up both families is 30-year-old Nonny Frett, a sign-language interpreter living in Athens, Georgia. As the biological daughter of one woman (a Crabtree girl), and as the more-or-less adopted daughter of another (a deaf and blind Frett woman), Nonny has, for as long as she can remember, been caught at the frontlines of the Crabtree-Frett battleground. Suddenly, when a deadly tragedy affects both families, Nonny knows that it is time to leave her husband Jonno in Athens and return to her mother Stacia's home at the dead end of Grace Street in Between. And it is there that everything for everyone might finally and forever change.

Between, Georgia is an exemplary novel by a singular writer who is in full command of the art of storytelling. Paradoxically, the story simultaneously overflows with gut-wrenching sadness and laugh-out-loud humor. Jackson's novel brilliantly explores abstractions redemption, love and grace through the most compelling characterizations to be found in contemporary fiction. Don't miss it! Tim Davis writes from Lillian, Alabama.

 

Every now and then a remarkable writer, following in the footsteps of great authors, comes along to re-energize American fiction. So it is with Joshilyn Jackson. Unmistakably influenced by three of America's pre-eminent Southern storytellers Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor Jackson, the…

Fiction

Southern shades and shadows

Review by Tim Davis

Seventeen-year-old Travis Shelton lives in the mountains of western North Carolina, and when Ron Rash's superb tale of redemption and healing begins, young Travis knows little of his family's or his region's history. Haunted by shades . . . as if created by the mountains' light-starved ridges and coves, the Shelton family's dark heritage from the Civil War is the reason the rural county in which they have lived for nearly 200 years is known as Bloody Madison. Indifferent about the past, Travis finds that the present becomes complicated when he has an encounter with Carlton Toomey.

One of the most enigmatic men in Madison County, Toomey impresses everyone as a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction. Beyond the apparent paradox, though, Toomey is purely and viciously dangerous. When Travis ignores the menace, he has a near-fatal encounter with Toomey that results in an estrangement from his family but creates a hesitant friendship with the solitary scofflaw Leonard Shuler. Secretly haunted by his own past, Schuler, in his role as reluctant mentor and friend, will lead Travis to question all that he believes to have been true about his obligations to his family's history and to his own future.

In The World Made Straight, Rash–like his Southern Gothic ancestors William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor–offers readers a powerful story about families and individuals troubled by subtle evils, persistent violence, malignant fear and the relentless encroachment of the past upon the present. At the same time, however, this highly recommended novel, vividly enriched by clear, concise prose, also becomes a beautifully rendered palimpsest of memory in which the brooding presence of buried regional and family history is finally overcome by the cathartic power of truth and sacrifice.

Tim Davis writes from Lillian, Alabama.

 

Seventeen-year-old Travis Shelton lives in the mountains of western North Carolina, and when Ron Rash's superb tale of redemption and healing begins, young Travis knows little of his family's or his region's history. Haunted by shades . . . as if created by the mountains'…

Fiction

Auster’s life-affirming odyssey

Review by Tim Davis

Meet Nathan Glass. He is eager to tell you all about himself. But to hear Nathan tell it, he is at least at the outset of this superbly comic novel a cynical 59-year-old man who has returned to Brooklyn for only one reason: he is quietly waiting to drop dead. As if Nathan's outlook isn't morbid enough, he seems eager to whip his poor rotten soul like some medieval penitent as he blames himself for nearly everything that has gone wrong in his disintegrating life: an acrimonious divorce, a battle against cancer and an estrangement from his daughter. Then, while he wanders alone through the dark hollows of his existence in Brooklyn somewhat like a displaced Candide something remarkable begins to happen. First, he encounters a long-lost nephew, Tom Wood, whose life seems nearly as damaged as Nathan's. Then Nathan meets Tom's enigmatic boss, the flamboyant bookstore owner Harry Brightman. With Tom and Harry as his unlikely companions, Nathan quickly finds himself swept away on a life-affirming odyssey filled with bizarre adventures and glorious revelations. Through Nathan's ironic involvement, all sorts of people discover renewed capacities for love, happiness, redemption and a profound sense of community. And even as things are falling terrifyingly apart, everything somehow turns out for the best in Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn Follies is another Paul Auster masterpiece. Ever since The New York Trilogy nearly 20 years ago, Auster through dozens of books has produced increasingly dazzling, provocative writing. He may remind readers of Franz Kafka, Nathaniel West or Philip Roth, but Auster as brilliant postmodern parodist and satirist is a unique talent. He may, in fact, be America's best writer. The Brooklyn Follies is quite simply a wonderful, lyrical novel, a joyful celebration of life's pleasures and ironies even in the face of terror and death. Read it for the laughter and wisdom it will bring you. You will not be disappointed.

Tim Davis teaches English at the University of West Florida.

Meet Nathan Glass. He is eager to tell you all about himself. But to hear Nathan tell it, he is at least at the outset of this superbly comic novel a cynical 59-year-old man who has returned to Brooklyn for only one reason: he is…

FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

A tale of mysteries and miracles

Review by Tim Davis

Once upon a time in 1873, a 14-year-old Yaqui girl known to her people as The Hummingbird gives birth to Teresita, the illegitimate mixed-race daughter of a powerful white rancher, Don Tomás Urrea. The restless mother soon abandons Teresita without ever telling Tomas about the child's existence. Miraculously, The Hummingbird's Daughter somehow survives until her sixth year. Then other miracles begin to reshape the girl's future: when Tomás finally discovers that Teresita is his daughter, he takes her in as a member of the Urrea family at the Cabora ranch.

Ten years later, however, Teresita's world changes when she is brutalized by an unspeakable act of violence. She slips into a coma and dreams that she has died. Only it is not a dream! As the family prays at her wake, a real miracle happens: Teresita returns from the dead. Moreover, she returns as an extraordinarily powerful curandera (faith healer) and embarks on a lifelong mission of healing thousands. News of Teresita's power soon spreads throughout Mexico but terrifying tensions rapidly build toward a catastrophic crisis as she attracts the dangerous attention of both the powerful Roman Catholic Church and the murderous Mexican government.

The Hummingbird's Daughter is an amazing first novel from a superb storyteller. Through some sort of sleight-of-hand sorcery, Luis Alberto Urrea—who is worthy of favorable comparison with Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo and Jorge Luis Borges at their very best—has artfully combined the sacred and the profane to create an extraordinarily mesmerizing and profoundly important novel. Yes, at one level The Hummingbird's Daughter is the epic story of Teresita's survival and her spiritual powers, but it is also a family's fascinating history (based on the author's own family); a story of cultural, religious and political conflict; and a paradoxical tale of magical realism and terrifying beauty.

Tim Davis teaches literature at the University of West Florida in Pensacola.

Once upon a time in 1873, a 14-year-old Yaqui girl known to her people as The Hummingbird gives birth to Teresita, the illegitimate mixed-race daughter of a powerful white rancher, Don Tomás Urrea. The restless mother soon abandons Teresita without ever telling Tomas about the…

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