Roses & Thorns: New Romance

Written by Fiona Hartley-Kroeger, GA

Romance novels have changed a lot since Janice Radway’s landmark scholarly work, Reading the Romance, first published in 1984. For one thing, they’re not just about straight white women finding fulfilment under the patriarchy. (That’s never been all that romance novels have been about.) In their exploration of many kinds of love between many kinds of people, today’s romance novels create precisely what Radway hoped for: “a place and a vocabulary with which to carry on a conversation about the meaning of…personal relations and the seemingly endless renewal of their primacy” (18). Romance is a beautiful, varied bouquet.

As the recent “romantasy” trend demonstrates, romantic plotlines and relationships are frequently central to works in other genres. Romance elements can be integral to works of literary fiction, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, horror, and much more.

In celebration of this versatile, ever-evolving genre, here are some recent favorites:

ROSES
These novels participate in the genres of contemporary and historical romance, with strong attention to diversity and thoughtful reflection on how they distinguish themselves from their more homogenous predecessors. HEA (Happily Ever After), of course, guaranteed!

book coverAshley Herring Blake, Delilah Green Doesn’t Care

Suuuuuuure she doesn’t. Photographer Delilah Green is on the cusp of making it in New York City, with a string of pleasant one-night stands and an invitation to participate in a gallery show. Unfortunately, she’s also agreed to photograph her stepsister’s wedding in small-town Oregon. A reluctant trip to her childhood hometown unearths a wealth of complicated relationships and family hurt, but also brings the possibility of new beginnings.

 

Alyssa Cole, A Princess in Theory
Struggling epidemiology grad student Naledi is pretty sure the emails she keeps getting are unusually persistent scams. After all, what are the odds that she’s actually the long-lost betrothed of Prince Thabiso? When Thabiso shows up in New York and in her life, though, things get interesting. As a Black woman in STEM trying to get through grad school and pay off her student loans, Naledi is an instantly sympathetic heroine; the realities of her chosen path initially clash with Thabiso’s over-privileged lifestyle in a way that’s both serious and funny. His journey toward understanding her is by turns humorous and touching, and the whole thing is incredibly fun with, of course, a sweet, solid emotional core.

Sonali Dev, Recipe for Persuasion
Jane Austen meets cooking competition (Dancing with the Stars-syle) in this second entry in Sonali Dev’s series about an overachieving Indian family living in California. (Don’t worry if you haven’t read the first book, Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors, though you should give that a try too!) In a twist on my favorite Jane Austen novel, Persuasion, chef Ashna Raje and her former first love, soccer star Rico Silva, are paired on a high-stakes cooking competition. Their dynamic is as delicious as the food they prepare while utterly failing to resist their feelings. This is a wonderfully flavorful novel about first love, second chances, complicated families, and—inevitably—cooking puns.

Alexis Hall, A Lady for a Duke
The traditional concerns of the classic Regency romance novel—personal autonomy, gendered social roles, issues of class, childhood trauma, and transformation through love—provide an ideal framework for a story about a trans heroine and her childhood best friend. Viola Carroll, presumed dead on the battlefield in France, has sacrificed a great deal to become her true self. Her childhood best friend, Gracewood, never recovered from her death. When they meet again, they both have a LOT of baggage to work through—but they do so thoughtfully and oh-so-tenderly, with a few (minimal) misunderstandings and a really lovely mood of trans affirmation throughout.

Courtney Milan, The Duke Who Didn’t
You’ll fall in love with the entire village of Wedgeford, something of a haven for members of the Chinese diaspora in rural Victorian England. In this series-starter, longtime villager Chloe Fong and half-Chinese, half-English nobleman Jeremy Wentworth navigate their feelings amid quaint village shenanigans. Chloe is Organized! Her prized possession is a clipboard! She WILL make a commercial success of her father’s new culinary concoction, a sauce of supreme savor! Jeremy is more complex than his jokester persona would have you think, but he’s genuinely a sunshiny, sweet man who maaaayyy have forgotten to mention one tiny detail about his identity. Oops? They’re adorable.

Cat Sebastian, The Queer Principles of Kit Webb & The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes
Cat Sebastian brings Georgian England to queer romance! Enter a world of highwaymen, coffee houses, and incredible fashion. The first book features a banter-filled romance between ex-highwayman Kit Webb and nobleman Percy, Lord Holland; the second stars Percy’s best friend/stepmother/bi icon Marian Hayes and idealistic Rob Brooks, Kit’s former partner in (literal) crime. Cuteness! Crimes! Coffee!

Further Rosy Reading:
Jane Austen, Persuasion
K.J. Charles, The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen & A Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel
Emily Henry, Book Lovers
Georgette Heyer, Lady of Quality

 

THORNS
Here, the HEA is…less guaranteed. These novels hail from a variety of other genres and draw on romance tropes, comment on romantic fiction expectations, or focus less on the HEA than on the sometimes painful process of navigating feelings and relationships (or, you know, saving the world).

Akwaeke Emezi, You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty

The line between genre and literary fiction is frequently a thin one, revealing more about publishing norms and audience expectations (or prejudices) than about a work’s narrative, stylistic, or thematic content. In this novel, published as literary fiction, sex and grief collide as Feyi fights a messy, utterly necessary battle to recover from a shocking loss and rediscover love.

 

 

Intisar Khanani, Thorn

This is a lovely, fleshed-out retelling of the Brothers Grimm tale “The Goose Girl.” The unpleasant bits (identity theft, talking severed horse heads) are thoughtfully elaborated, and what begins as a tale of escaping abuse and betrayal gradually develops into a heart-tugging love story.

 

 

 

T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone

This is not a novel where the princess marries the prince and lives happily ever after. Actually, the prince murders one sister, abuses another, and deserves what’s coming to him when Princess Marra decides to take him down. There IS a cute romance, though, amid Marra’s efforts to complete impossible tasks, gather allies, and figure out how to murder the man she’s next in line to marry. (Maybe two cute romances, if you squint.) This is a perfectly dark fairy tale with all the unpleasant sorcery and underground tomb mazes you could wish for.

 

Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“Lesbian necromancers in space” isn’t INACCURATE, per se, but that description doesn’t do justice to Muir’s tangled web of love, grief, mental instability, and space palaces. The necromantic lesbians are cute, sure (by some definitions), but there’s a whole buffet of other relationships running the gamut from the wholesome to the wildly disturbing, and they’re all DELICIOUS.

 

 

 

Emily Tesh, Silver in the Wood & Drowned Country (coming soon!)
If sheer sweetness was the only criterion, these two novellas could go under Roses, but the HEA is by no means guaranteed. Tobias, the Wild Man of Greenhollow, and Henry Silver, newly arrived owner of Greenhollow Manor, undergo horror-filled trials of the heart to be together—only to undergo an acrimonious breakup that precipitates the second volume. Twining around their relationship are wonderful elements of English fairy lore; this is a great choice for fans of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell who would prefer something a little shorter.  

 

Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, Heaven Official’s Blessing: Tian Guan Ci Fu (coming soon!)

An exemplar of the Chinese danmei (boys’ love) genre by the author of The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi (the novel on which the 2019 drama The Untamed is based). The romance between a god and a ghost is incredibly sweet; it’s everything else that’s thorny! The epic tale spans 800 years, three realms, an extensive, memorable cast, martial arts, and a love story of unmatched devotion. This is the officially licensed English translation. Coming soon!

 

Further Thorny Reading:
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber
Freya Marske, A Marvellous Light & A Restless Truth (A Power Unbound coming soon!)
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Gods of Jade & Shadow

Did you know? We also have a selection of romance on audiobook!

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New Book Highlight: Creatures of Passage

This dream of a novel takes us to the bleak suburbs of Washington DC, Anacostia to be exact, where we follow the path of Nephthys Kinwell, who taxis people in grief to wherever they need to go in her old green Plymouth, which has a disgruntled ghost of a white woman in the trunk, and which never runs out of gas.  She intuits who needs a lift in this magical car.  Nephthys, herself, is grieving the loss of her twin brother, Osiris, who went missing years ago.  And when her great-nephew shows up at her door one day, she is forced to face that grief.  This is a quiet book, not unlike Plainsong by Kent Haruf, winner of the New Yorker Book Award and finalist for the 1999 National Book Award, that will steal your heart.  Creatures of Passage, was shortlisted for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and a 2021 Notable Book selection by NPR and the Washington Post.   

You can find Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé on the New Books Shelf at the Literatures and Languages Library. The catalog record is linked here.

This highlight was written by Karen Huck, Library Specialist for Collections, Events and Outreach at the Literatures and Languages Library.

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New Book Highlight: Manywhere: stories

“People think contentment is a gentle, warm thing, like bathwater, that needs only occasional replenishing to keep it from turning slowly tepid. In my experience, contentment often requires more ruthless and more immediate defending.”

From “Bump,” in Manywhere: stories by Morgan Thomas

The bright green lightning bolt and colorful birds on the face of Manywhere jumped out at me from the New Books shelf in the Literatures and Languages Reading Room, though they didn’t provide much of an indication of the book’s contents.  

Manywhere: stories is a collection of nine pieces of short fiction following queer and genderqueer characters in the American South throughout various stages of history. Author Morgan Thomas displays an impressive range of styles and voices, offering explorations of characters in first- and third-person narrative and through newspaper extracts, letters, and emails. As each character navigates their own past and present, they touch on relationships with parents, partners, and places they’ve left behind. They address illness, pregnancy, and versions of care. They seek places for themselves in history and sacrifice partnerships to secure them. And they consider the bodies they were born into, and what that means for who they are becoming.

Through compelling and emotionally intelligent prose, the stories in Manywhere ask the reader consider the relationships they sustain with their own bodies, with their parents, and with their pasts.

You can find Manywhere: stories on the New Books Shelf at the Literatures and Languages Library. The catalog record is linked here.

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Street Haunting: The Flâneur in Literature

Image shows an impressionist painting depicting people strolling down an intersection in Paris

Paris Street; Rainy Day by Gustave Caillebotte (1877), The Art Institute of Chicago

“The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer, it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions.” –Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 1863

In his essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” nineteenth-century French poet and critic, Charles Baudelaire, established his definition of the flâneur, a figure that continues to capture the imagination of writers and artists more than a century later. Literally but imperfectly translated as “stroller” or “idler,” the flâneur is the quintessential observer, the outsider whose meandering path skims along, but does not directly intersect, with the paths of those that surround him or her. In Baudelaire’s eye, the flâneur was inextricably tied with the artist and the poet—the ability to return to one’s home and fashion something immortal out of these passing glimpses of modern city life.

It is not surprising then, that throughout the intervening century and a half, numerous modern and contemporary writers have explored the iconic image of the flaneur, from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to Teju Cole’s Open City. In these works, the act of wandering a city often becomes a journey of self-discovery and inward reflection.

And while in Baudelaire’s day, the flâneur was generally assumed to be white and male, more contemporary works have challenged this preconception. Through some writer’s eyes, the act of observing, and the gaze itself, has taken on a new power and potential. Viewing the flâneur through a feminist or postcolonial lens, street haunting (as Virginia Woolf calls it) raises the questions of who is able to be invisible and unobserved in the modern city and what this capability says about modern society.

Today, we’ve highlighted a few works in the library’s collection, both historical and contemporary that explore this lesser-known image of the flâneur in literature. Why not be transported somewhere new today?

Open City by Teju Cole

Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole’s debut novel, Open City is about many things—identity, dislocation, history, and love. But first, it is about a solitary walker setting out from his home in Morningside Heights and learning the city at his feet. While the narrator, a Nigerian doctor doing his residency, wanders the streets of New York, he reflects on his recent breakup with his girlfriend and encounters a string of local immigrants who enrich and complicate his portrait of the city and himself. For Open City, the term “street haunting” is perhaps particularly apt; this post-colonial look at New York City reflects the unique loneliness that stems from isolation in the midst of a crowd.

Quartet by Jean Rhys

Rhys’ debut 1928 novel explores the sometimes squalid but often mesmerizing underbelly of bohemian Paris, a world Rhys herself knew only too well. Quartet is a roman à clef, an autobiographical novel, exploring a quartet of four lovers whose foibles and trials mirror the experiences of Rhys during her marriage to her first husband and her concurrent messy affair and financial entanglement with literary luminary Ford Maddox Ford and his partner, Stella Bowen. Isolated and increasingly troubled amidst the rich literary and artistic culture of a city in bloom, Quartet lays bare the at-times stark realities of Café Society in Paris, particularly for women.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

The titular character of Mrs. Dalloway sets out from her London home with a simple goal in mind—to buy flowers for her party. But what begins as a practical errand quickly diverges as Dalloway’s journey provides an opportunity for the protagonist to consider the complex ways her life intersects with those of the other characters that populate the novel, as well as where the path of her own life might have diverged in the past. A complex modernist classic, Mrs. Dalloway is at times challenging, but infinitely rewarding for its exploration of how a single day, and a single task, can unveil the intricate layers of a person’s life and mind.

NW by Zadie Smith

Traversing the eponymous North Western postcode area in London, NW presents a complicated portrait of the city and modern adulthood. The novel follows four Londoners as they try to make lives and identities outside of Cadwell, the council estate where they grew up. Smith’s writing style immerses its reader in the unique culture of Northwest London—from its immigrant dialects to its cultural landmarks.  This tragicomic novel swings between violence and scandal, but the protagonists’ quests to define and achieve happiness on their own terms will resonate with anyone struggling to navigate life in a modern city.

French Milk by Lucy Knisley

Known for her travelogues and graphic memoirs, French Milk, is one of cartoonist Lucy Knisley’s earliest efforts in the field. This travelogue narrates Knisley’s six-week trip to Paris with her mother as they explore the city and face milestones in life. Blending musings, photographs, and illustrations, Knisley reflects on family, love, and the looming prospect of adulthood as she samples some of the culinary and cultural delights the City of Light has to offer. While it is at times self-indulgent (what travelogue isn’t?), it offers a charming and tempting snapshot of Paris through the eyes of a consummate artist and foodie.

Taipei by Tao Lin

Many of the books that explore the figure of the flâneur traverse the line between fiction and memoir, and Tapei is no exception. Based on the author’s own life, Tapei is an undeniably modern take on the figure of the flâneur—providing an unvarnished portrait of the way we live and love today. The novel follows Paul from Manhattan to Taipei, Taiwan as he navigates his artistic ambitions alongside his cultural heritage. As relationships bloom and fail, the novel’s characters devote much of their time to drugs and screens, numbing agents that distract from the by turns bleak and absurd realities of modern life. While opinions about Tao Lin and his work vary, Taipei is undeniably effective in distilling the tedium, the excitement, and the uncertainty of being alive, young, on the fringes in America. 

Further Reading Suggestions for the Fledgling Flâneur:

The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays by Charles Baudelaire

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

My Year Abroad by Chang-Rae Lee

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta

20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth by Xiaolu Guo

People of the City by Cyprian Ekwensi

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Carnet de Voyage by Craig Thompson

New York: A Mod Portrait of the City by Vladimir Fuka

Bibliography

Baudelaire, Charles, and Jonathan Mayne. The Painter of Modern Life, and Other Essays. London: Phaidon, 1964.

Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867 2006. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. https://www-proquest-com.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/encyclopedias-reference-works/baudelaire-charles-1821-1867/docview/2137915067/se-2?accountid=14553.

Flâneur 2010., edited by Ian Buchanan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://www-proquest-com.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/encyclopedias-reference-works/flâneur/docview/2137953454/se-2?accountid=14553.

Lopate, Phillip. The Art of the Personal Essay : an Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. New York: Anchor Books, 1994.

Wood, James. “The Arrival of Enigmas.” The New Yorker, February 20, 2011. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/28/the-arrival-of-enigmas.

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New Fiction Spotlight: The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

Cover art for the Secret Lives of Church Ladies

“I don’t question God,” declares the titular character of “Eulah,” the first story in The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.

“But maybe you should question the people who taught you this version of God. Because it’s not doing you any favors,” the narrator replies.

This exchange is at the crux of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection. The collection is full of hope, heartbreak, hunger, and love. Its protagonists find themselves torn between the demands of church and family and those of their own bodies. They wrestle with their appetites, illicit or otherwise, and usually come out on top in one way or another.

The nine stories that make up The Secret Lives of Church Ladies span a wide array of turbulent and fascinating relationships with mothers, fathers, sisters, and lovers. In “Dear Sister,” a woman writes a letter to the half-sister she’s never met to inform her of the death of their father. In “Snowfall,” the narrator struggles to adjust to both the realities of living in a northern climate and her mother’s disavowal of her relationship with another woman.

Despite these tumultuous relationships, the stories are full of comfort—offered from sister to sister, daughter to mother, and lover to lover. These offerings are often in the form of food, whether it be homemade, fast-food, or frozen.

One of the collection’s most powerful stories, for example, is “Peach Cobbler,” which begins: “My mother’s peach cobbler was so good, it made God himself cheat on his wife.” Like many in the collection, “Peach Cobbler” deals with infidelity, unhealthy relationships, and the ache to be loved with wry humor and compassion.

Each story is told in the first-person, lending the collection a powerful intimacy. The reader is left feeling as though they really have been let in on the secret lives of these powerful storytellers. In The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Philyaw paints nuanced portraits of vulnerable and resilient women who rely upon each other and create communities worth treasuring.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is available now at the Literatures and Languages Library.

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The Distance Between High and Low: A Southern Gothic Novel (Book Review)

“Pearl said I’d have to let go of stuff I couldn’t have, no matter how much I wanted it, or got used to chasing it.”—Peck (Pearl’s grandson), one of the two protagonists in the novel

cover of book, "The distance between high and Low"

Photo by Sarah Lerch

Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it. In The Distance Between High and Low: A Southern Gothic Novel by Kaye Park Hinckley, the ‘it’ asked for is an absent father’s identity. But knowing who your father is is not the same as having a father. He must want you more than he wants drugs, alcohol, a ‘good time,’ gambling, money, or prestige, as is made clear by the end of the novel. A father’s love should be a given in a child’s life. The characters in this novel each confront this longing for perfect parental love in their own way.

The novel’s subtitle is “a Southern Gothic Novel,” and it fulfills that promise. The location is Highlow, Alabama. Anyone from north of the Mason-Dixon line is a Yankee, not to be trusted, not one of ‘us.’ The characters are or have been damaged people (some have been ‘fixed’). Gambling, neglect, booze, death, entangled family relations, drugs, guns, church, secrets, and rumors are woven throughout the story. I enjoy the Southern Gothic genre, so I jumped right in and I’m glad that I did.

Using a slightly modified version of Faulkner’s technique in As I Lay Dying, Hinckley has different characters narrate each of the (sometimes very short) chapters to drive the plot forward. It works. We gain insight to the characters’ thoughts beyond the well-written dialogue (that include conversations between preteens in the 1960s). The narrators are the characters that grow over the course of the story; those that do not narrate but are still essential characters remain predictable in their behavior; what they think is made obvious for the reader through the other narrators.

“After that, Lila wouldn’t go anywhere with her father, though she wanted to. She couldn’t trust him. ‘Of course, it all left an empty hole in her heart,’ Miss Pearl said. ‘It changed her, made her fragile, and out of balance. Futile longing for what you don’t have will do that.’”

The book is written in two parts: Part One covers the period when the twins Peck and Lizzie, the main characters of the novel, are thirteen years old. They are the children of their ‘sometimes crazy’ single mother, Lila. A little over thirteen years prior, Lila headed to a Cincinnati art school against her mother Pearl’s advice.  About nine months later, she returns, blurry eyed and heavily pregnant. She now spends her time in her attic room painting pictures of faces on china plates.

All live in Pearl’s house with Izear, adopted years ago by her to save him from his abusive father and absent mother. Pearl is a descendant of the founding father of Highlow, Alabama. They are Main Street kind of people. They are the accepted; if they accept you, then you are considered respectable.

“The mystery of our father’s identity feeds on his heart like an unhurried dragon. But it doesn’t bother me so much.”—Lizzie, Peck’s twin sister, the other protagonist

Peck wants to find out who his father is; Lizzie doesn’t seem to care that much—only for her brother’s sake.

“I was in the care of the bird-women from the time I was four, so I don’t remember much of my real parents.”—Hobart, Peck and Lizzie’s next-door neighbor

Hobart, their “Yankee” (an outsider to the folks of Highlow, Alabama) neighbor, was adopted out of one of Detroit’s Catholic orphanages by the childless McSwains when he was about eleven. When he arrived in Highlow he was a just a bit younger than Lila.

“I have a father!”—Little Benedict, Peck and Lizzie’s younger playmate

Little Benedict is younger than Peck and Lizzie, and is an annoying, but well-tolerated tagalong playmate. Little Benedict’s mom despises him, and his spineless father allows him to be emotionally abused by her. Big Benedict loves him but loves peace with his wife more. Little Benedict does have it better than his little sister. She isn’t given a name or brought home after her birth. Her mother doesn’t want her, and her father is too weak to stand up for her. Little Benedict is proud to announce to the ‘fatherless’ Peck and Lizzie though, “I HAVE a father.” Quantity over quality, I guess.

The pace of Part One is just what is needed. Time enough to get to know the characters and their peculiarities, but fast moving enough to keep the story interesting and move the plot along. If Peck can’t literally meet his father (who he has been told lives in Cincinnati and is an artist like is mother), then he decides that catching a live osprey will do. The captured bird would be taken home and tethered in the backyard as an acceptable substitute for his biological father. This quest becomes Peck’s obsession.

The pace of Part Two naturally changes as it covers the period a few years later as the characters (that are still alive) mature. Some go away to college, start businesses, and some marry. They live on, the scars of their childhoods visible in their life choices.

There are a few bumps in Part Two. I felt the way that Lizzie’s attitude changed towards her late husband after reading files on his computer needed to be explained. I wish the author would have shared what changed her mind and softened her heart to his serial cheating and controlling nature. Also, Lizzie’s feelings toward Anthony, her husband’s friend, seemed rather flat, even at the end.

“I never held my father. But once, I held the hawk.”—Peck

The author brilliantly used different symbolism throughout the novel to tie the people and the time periods together.

The Judge, a second cousin to Pearl and the only judge (only one God) in Highlow, is mentioned, but we only hear him speak once, when he saves (a savior) Hobart from one of his poor, stupid decisions and, for this decision, eventual death. He narrates a few chapters, not by speaking to the reader, but by letting the reader glance over his shoulder at the “Official Notes of Pearl’s Cousin, The Judge.” He keeps ‘notes’ on the people of Highlow and all that pass through it (his Bible or is this his Book of Life?). Pearl occasionally visit him to fill him in (confession). The Judge is “responsible for conclusions” and the keeper of “the truth, and nothing but the truth,” as Little Benedict’s little sister parrots from watching too many Perry Mason reruns. He is the one that banishes the liars, cheaters, violent, drug dealers and users, and the like) from Highlow and sets them up in a used car lot and real estate business in Florida (sends them to “Hell.” Have you ever been to Florida in August?).

With only Baptist churches locally, Pearl and her family must to leave town to find a Catholic church (to meet with their Heavenly Father), just as Peck and Lizzie thought they would have to leave town (get on a bus and go to Cincinnati) to visit their biological father. Lizzie asked at one point why they couldn’t just go to a Baptist church (even though she wasn’t big on going to either church), an attitude she had towards her father—not caring much to meet or know him either.

The most frequently used symbol used in this novel is that of the osprey. From the first page “the moonlight divides like the wide wings of the Osprey and falls on Lizzie’s twin children” to the end of the novel, the osprey is always there, but unattainable.

The osprey can be “low enough to tempt, then flying too high to touch.” It makes its presence known by flying around and distracting Peck but is always out of reach by the time Peck can get to him. The osprey comes into town and alights on houses; when noticed and chased, it flies away.

Peck’s desire is to catch a live osprey; he doesn’t want to kill it, he wants to hold it—to have it. The novel recounts the only time Peck held an osprey. The osprey had its talons stuck in a fish too heavy for it to be able to fly away. When Peck helped free its talons from the fish, the osprey lashed out and pierced Peck’s palms, drawing blood and leaving scars. Izear warned Peck that the bird will “claw out yo’ eyes, you ever caught it.” Once, in a fit of rage, Lizzie yelled at him, “Let it claw your eyes out!”

Fathers that don’t want you, hurt you and leave behind scars. Izear and Lizzie knew this; deep down, Peck probably knew it too. The pain this father symbol caused did not deter him. He was determined to ‘catch’ his father, to have him, or at least the bird, alive and physically with him.

Hobart even offers to help him catch an osprey. In describing his childhood, Hobart describes the nuns at the orphanage before his adoption as “swooping white-winged women” and that he was “under the care of the hooded bird-women.” But Hobart doesn’t want to catch the ospreys, he wants to kill them; and he does. He has them stuffed; he does it for Peck, but by that point, Peck can’t appreciate it—Peck wouldn’t have appreciated it.

But it is Little Benedict that is the character that has the osprey symbolism applied to him: when Little Benedict nasty mother hollers him home, he “flies,” and he is described as having a “little bird chest.” By the end of the novel, you understand why Little Benedict is described in terms saved for the father symbol.

And at one of Pearl’s annual Christmas open houses, a blind man arrives wearing a golden-eyed eagle on the back of his jacket, with the wings continuing down the sleeves. Is this their father? Surely this is too obvious. He glides into the house as if he’d been there before, selects the lucky piece of lane cake that contains the porcelain baby Jesus, goes over the Lila and is kissed by her gently, and then leaves without the porcelain baby Jesus $100 prize winnings or a word to anyone. I told you this was Southern Gothic.

I am glad I found and read this book. There is so much more to it; hopefully I have whetted your appetite for it, like a slice of Izear’s sour cream pound cake offered up at one of Pearl’s Christmas open houses. I enjoyed it thoroughly, rereading some sentence just to savor their richness. So much wisdom in clusters of fifteen or so words. The characters were well-developed and for even the worst of them, I felt some sympathy, knowing what had happened to them when they were children. Some of Pearl’s wisdom and mercy must have rubbed off on me while reading. In the end, not everyone got what they wanted, but everyone got what they needed—or deserved.

At one point there were at least three sudden, unexpected events that occurred within a ten-page span in the novel. After the third one, I had to close the book, sit there, and grin. She had me and I loved it. Please continue writing, Ms. Hinckley; keep writing your Southern Gothic novels, and I’ll read each and every one of them. In fact, I have two more being shipped to me right now.

 

 

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