Customer Reviews

Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

An unopened book is a tease that can lead to disappointment. But here is one that delivers. It's well-written and as deep as a blue-water swimming hole that kids used to flock to, before everyone put up no trespassing signs, afraid of liability.

It's a book that transports you to a time and place: 1979 on Pisgah Ridge in North Carolina, a community where "there were no blacks... Sure there were the ones who cleaned our houses and mowed our lawns, but they all left on the last bus" to return to the town in the valley. "And they knew enough to never miss that ride down."

The narrator, Shelby, is a high school sophomore and the only girl in a "mangy pack" consisting of her brother Emory, his best friend Jimbo Riggs --- son of the pastor of the largest Baptist church on the Ridge --- "and a spare friend of theirs and an excess cousin." Virtually every summer evening, these kids, riding in the back of Emory's pick-up, end up at a swimming hole --- not causing trouble, just hanging out.

But there's a new family on the Ridge, from Sri Lanka. They're not only dark-skinned but Muslim. Rather impulsively, Turtle invites the teen daughter, Sanna, to ride along to Blue Hole. Over the summer, she's tentatively, then dramatically, welcomed into the group. But not everybody is ready for an integrated Ridge, say nothing of an integrated creek.

Right up front, before the flashback, the reader knows something will go awry: "It was the men in white bed sheets that changed us forever --- them and the Blue Hole, that is."

The narrator doesn't claim a Christian faith, neither as a teen nor as an adult transplanted to Boston. Yet she notices its evidence in others: her Methodist mother and particularly Jimbo, the Baptist preacher's son, who holds the "mangy pack" and the book together.

Author Joy Jordan-Lake's writing --- her characterizations and figures of speech --- is downright refreshing. Though in chapter after chapter the teens' parents are largely absent from the scene, they are not totally "out of the loop." In one scene the phone rings when the Garden Club ladies are meeting at Shelby's house. It's Sanna, inviting Shelby for a sleepover. Shelby's mother gives permission and then says, "Shelby, sugar." Shelby notes, "It was the kind of sugar that works like a yank to a leash...

"`Who was it? Which of your girlfriends asked you to sleep over?'

"Bless Mama. She said this as if there were legions of girls waiting to ask me to their houses... `The, um, the new girl.'

"Now, all white Southern women keep as a weapon...a certain smile that can be whipped out of storage and tacked up in an instant, covering over a multitude of too-candid moments."

Shelby explains: Mama "was considering, I knew, that the Garden Club ladies were gripping sweet tea beside her, but also what Jesus would do. `Well, now,' she murmured. `"Turn ye not away strangers, lest ye entertain angels unawares.' Isn't that right?' Mama looked to the wife of the good Reverend Riggs" --- a descendant of several Confederate heroes --- and Jimbo's mother.

I finished reading BLUE HOLE BACK HOME 24 hours ago, and the characters and setting linger in my mind. This is a delightfully haunting book. I don't want to give too much away, but I urge you to take my advice and read it.

--- Reviewed by Evelyn Bence

Joy Jordan-Lake has crafted a beautiful, tragic southern tale that will have you exclaiming, "Great day in the mornin'!" with tears running down your cheeks. Well, before you do that you'll long for a wide front porch with a screen to keep out the bugs and a slippery glass of sweet iced tea. You'll laugh with and love Shelby Lenoir, big brother Emerson and best friend James Beauregard (could the names be any more beautifully southern?). The characters are lively and imaginative. I fell in love with them all - Mollybird Pitman included. Well, I'm not sure that I loved Mort Beckwith but he was imperative to the story so I tolerated him and his band of idiots. I am not a writer (and if you've read this far you've surmised as much) but I do know good writing when I see it. You simply must read this book. It is, sadly, relevant for our world even now. So there... There's my very first amazon review. Now stop reading my feeble words and buy or borrow a copy. You will not regret it.

I'd give Blue Hole Back Home 6 stars if I could. It was the best book I read all last year. I'm reading it a second time now, as it's the first selection of a newly-formed book club I'm a member of.

Not only is this a hauntingly beautiful story, but Joy Jordan Lake's prose is nothing short of delicious. The images her words conjur are rich and wonderful. As an author, she ranks with the very best.

A beautifully wrought, emotionally captivating, can't-put-down-for-the-life-of-me book. Joy Jordan-Lake's voice is so powerful it'll knock you right over, even if you're laying down. Open the book for the premise, stay for the prose, and close for the deep connection you've established with each character. You'll want to turn right back to page one and start reading all over again.

Both lyrical and visual, Jordan-Lake's writing will take you right "Back Home" along with Turtle, Jimbo and all the memorable characters on Pisgah Ridge. Based on a real life experience of the author's and set, unbelievably (!) in 1979, this is an important and relevant story of racial unrest in the south...not in the 40's or 50's but in the late 70's! Where were you when, and what music were you listening to and can you believe something like this could have happend so recently? All of these questions you will ask the book clubs, relatives and friends that you will HAVE to recommend, share and gift this book to after you read it. Laugh-out-loud come backs, take-your-breath-away descriptions and tears-streaming-down-your-face climaxes are this writer's gift to all who take the plunge into the Blue Hole.

I was not impressed with this book.
And a big turnoff for me was the language and dialect. I did not find at all authentic (and I was born and raised in the area in which the story is set). Compare it to anything by Pamela Duncan or Fair and Tender Ladies by Lee Smith and you will easily see the difference between these characters' speech and REAL Appalachian Vernacular.
I couldn't get past Chapter 3. It was billed as a serious novel about racism in 1979. But I am sorry to say, I found it (at least the part I got through) a bit silly and flat as a pancake.
It read like a story intended for a much younger audience, although I know that was not the intent. It reminded me of a child's fable or "after-school special".

I enjoyed this book so much that I bought several additional copies to share with friends. The author writes with great sensitivity about a group of high school friends in the South during the 1960's. The character studies were flawless. The emotions were deep. The subject of segragation during it's early years was superb.

This was an excellent book. It is a very realistic story that is very interesting and riveting at the end. I recommend reading it.

BLUE HOLE BACK HOME tugs at the heart like that big swimming hole drew the young people of the Appalachian mountain town to its frigid waters in that hot summer of 1979.
A tale so haunting in its realness, its earthiness, its foreshadowing of tragedy from the moment Farsanna, "the new girl lifted her brown legs up over the tailgate of the truck" and the mangy pack introduced her to the Blue Hole and the all-white community of teens. Shelby Lenoir Maynard and the other four teens of the pack welcomed the new girl from Sri Lanka.
Years later, Shelby tells the story of what happened as a result of their actions. She was sixteen-years-old then, and "skinny and awkward and carried whatever smarts I had then like a warning." Joy Jordan-Lake paints the characters with a scalpel. Shelby's nickname of Turtle gives us an inkling into her psyche and the naiveté of the pack.
Turtle's older brother Emerson "billed himself as a bona fide Jock and hid books, old poetry mostly, in issues of Sports Illustrated." His best friend, Beauregard Riggs the preacher's son, Jimbo, "handled words like electrical wires he just might dip into water." L.J. was the pack's resident genius---"clumsy and stringy and smart in a school that cared nothing for schooling." Bobby, Welp, was a whittler, a fence sitter, and--perhaps a sulking Judas? Always present, Big Dog, the chubby golden retriever who loved barbeque and Dr. Pepper.
The pack offered a hand and friendship to "the new girl." Farsanna took it--Sanna, the color of hot cocoa, speech stiff and stilted, face expressionless, hair flowing licorice, eyes "black pits that might or might not be hiding explosives." And where Sanna went, so did Stray, the black and white spotted mutt who adopted her.
When the friends welcomed the dark-skinned girl into their circle they thought they were a good generation past that racial "stuff" that had happened years before. That's why they decided to "say nothing to nobody," not about the shooting they witnessed the night they drove down into the valley where the blacks live; nor about Turtle and Sanna's almost hit and run, nor the burnt cross on Em's truck seat--"all the stuff that didn't mean anything." Too late, they come face to face with bigotry and suffer it's vengence. "It was the men in white bed sheets that changed us," writes Shelby, "them and the Blue Hole changed us forever."
They say you can't go home again, but Joy takes us back to her own teen years in Tennessee where there she knew a new girl from Sri Lanka. There was a real racial incident that gave birth to the story. From that she spins her tale. It's fiction, but her characters breathe discomfort. Mort "a Clydesdale behind skittish ponies"--the pack thought him "all swagger and snarl. Him and his gun for a security blanket." Jimbo's daddy, whose "flesh nor his thoughts seemed to take on a firm substance." He preached a nice God. "Truth was something the Good Reverend liked to hand out soft and slow and sweet-smelling . . ." Then of course there was the Blue Hole, not blue at all but deep rusty brown when churned up, its banks heavy with teenagers and boys contending in wild contests swinging from the rope swing and casting their bodies into the unforgiving mountain waters.
The story begins with Shelby grown and living in Boston. A chance encounter triggers her memory of "the new girl who tore up our calm, or the good that snuck up on us in the dark." In the telling she sheds her shell to face the guilt. "Maybe some parts of your past don't stay just where you thought your life left them all shredded in pieces."
I was stunned when I began reading--stunned by the incredible language--prose that sings. I read the first chapter four times before coming to terms that I couldn't do the book justice on a trip to Hawaii. Home with no distractions I could feast on the banquet of poetic prose. We writers can read how-to-write tomes endlessly and learn to put words on paper--but to make those words sing? That takes God inspired talent and a superb mastery of the tongue. Joy's use of singular action verbs, vivid description, scintillating dialogue, and unique metaphors mesmerized me. You'd think it was a textbook for all my highlighting. I've shared some of the sentences and phrases with my critique group.
Now, as I write, I am constantly challenged to find a livelier word, more imaginative simile, or less clichéd phrase. Just reading Joy is an education in exceptional writing. I can't begin to imagine what two days under her tutelage will produce. Can you?

This was one of the best books I've read in a long time. When I finished, I felt like the characters were real people I remembered from my own past. That's how good the characterization was. The voice of the main character, Turtle, was endearing but never sweet, and I was right there with her in the story. By the time I got to the second half, I had trouble putting it down, wanting to know what would happen. This book is both enlightening and satisfying.