The Curing Season [Paperback]

Leslie Wells (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2002

It's 1948 on a tobacco farm in southern Virginia and a poor farm girl hopes to break away from an abusive father by finding a suitor to rescue her. But for Cora Slaughter, a slight deformity forces her to live in the shadow of her sister Sibby, who basks in the attention of all the local boys. Tormented by the thought that she will grow up to be a spinster, and teased by her schoolmates, Cora takes refuge in the books that her teacher lends her. But life takes a dramatic turn when Cora meets a dark, handsome stranger who comes to town looking for work. What she doesn't realize is that the life she is escaping is ideal compared to the hell she is about to enter.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Set in the tobacco-farming country of southern Virginia in 1948, this dark first novel describes an existence not much different from life in the antebellum era. Crops are still harvested by hand, blacks and whites live in separate if often similar worlds and white children walk to one-room schoolhouses. Narrator Cora Mae Slaughter, 16, one of four children of a struggling white tenant farmer and his downtrodden wife, is an avid reader who finds a haven in that schoolhouse, not only from her alcoholic and brutal father but also from the mockery of her classmates, who tease her about her clubfoot. Afraid she'll never have a boyfriend, Cora is easy prey for itinerant farm laborer Aaron Melville. Seduced as much by Aaron's apparently superior background as by his kisses, Cora follows him to a cabin, where he rapes her. Shamed and hopeful of winning his love, she stays with him, and they rove from farm to farm in search of work. After the birth of baby Joshua, Aaron's behavior improves for a time, but before long, he begins to mistreat Cora in increasingly painful and perverse ways. The reader hopes that she'll succeed in breaking away from Aaron's control, as she does in establishing a friendship with a young black woman. Wells idealizes the women's relationship beyond credibility, however, and she also fails to make Cora's acquiescence and entrapment plausible. Cora's tale rings most true not when she is describing, often in clich‚-ridden prose, her suffering and salvation, but in Wells's faithful renditions of southern Virginia speech and customs. The set piece on the hand curing of tobacco (which gives the book its double-meaning title) is a fascinating depiction of a bygone way of life. 5-city author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Clubfooted Cora leads a dreary life in a tobacco farm sharecropping family in southern Virginia after World War II: her father is a drinker, her mother is worn down with the hardship, she's teased at school, and suffers in comparison to her pretty, popular older sister Sibby. Bad goes to much worse when, with a little encouragement from flattered Cora, an iterant worker takes a fancy to the poor crippled farm girl. The grinding poverty and abuse of her new life with Aaron is graphically portrayed and evokes a view of rural life on a par with The Beans of Egypt, Maine (LJ 3/1/85). Ultimately, despite a near miraculous escape for Cora from her plight, the dismal scene is more tedious than disturbing. Of interest for regional fiction collections. Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., VA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (May 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 044667866X
• ISBN-13: 978-0446678667
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,767,233 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars brilliant, harrowing and haunting tale of domestic violence, September 20, 2001

By 

Bruce J. Wasser (Lake Bluff, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Curing Season (Hardcover)

Leslie Wells' debut novel, "The Curing Season," may be one of the most upsetting and important books you will ever read. Brilliantly conceived, this harrowing novel flays the reader's sensibilities as it unblinkingly reveals the hellish and horrific nature of domestic abuse in grim, evocative and devastating detail. Embedded in this vital book are lessons on endurance, wrenching avowals of the depth of love a mother has for a child and stirring portraits of heroic risks friends quietly, but unhesitatingly, take for each other. Written with feminist sensitivity and a sense of outrage against violence against women, "The Curing Season" will surely be recognized as a classic in its genre, favorably compared with Dorothy Allison's "Bastard out of Carolina."

Haunting contemporary questions permeate the novel, set in rural Virginia some fifty years ago. Where can abused and battered women turn when "the right to hit your woman is sacred...right up there with the liberty to clobber your kids"? How can an individual woman, beaten into submission and gradually losing hope, solve an equation where shame, fear and remorse equal degradation? Under what circumstances can one woman, watching her life crumble away and her personality dissolve, gain the strength of reclaim her identity?

One of the truly noble qualities of "The Curing Season" is its introduction of its protagonist, Cora Slaughter Melville, one of the more remarkable characters in recent American literature. Wells invests Cora with extraordinary resolve and indominable dignity, attributes upon which she must call to overcome circumstances which would conmpel others to consideration of suicide. Born into rural poverty, afflicted physically with a clubfoot and spiritually with an abusive alcoholic father, Cora Slaughter has learned both to accept her life's circumstances and to identify with the sufferings of others. This empathy encompasses all beings who have unfairly suffered or who are marginalized by a society reeking with prejudice and ignorance. She forgives her mother's passivity and receives solace from her wise and strong older sister, Sibby.

"The Curing Season" dissects the cycle of domestic violence through the events which befall Cora. Her physical deformity, a clubfoot "like a glutted sluggish earthworm curled in upon itself," becomes a terrifying metaphor for the stunted, blasted life opening up before her during her late teen years. A drifter's overtures appear heaven-sent, truly miraculous. Cora's eventual debasement shimmers in intensity between physical and psychological ruin.

In her review of the novel, Nikki Giovanni tells readers that "The Curing Season" reminds us about the necessity of standing up to evil. It is this lesson that Leslie Wells enshrines in her novel. Cora Slaughter's condition -- a beaten, devastated woman -- is all the more hurtful because it did not occur in a vacuum. The evil of domestic violence was accepted and ritualized by too many men in her time; her victimization did not elicit outcries of conscience on her behalf. It was on the shoulders of Cora Slaughter, alone, on which the weight of evil rested. Leslie Wells' desperately moving novel implores all of us to gain the vision, dignity and courage to denounce social evil and eliminate it from our midst.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Curing Season Review, June 9, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Curing Season (Hardcover)

The Curing Season is a marvelous first novel and an extraordinarily engrossing and moving read! Cora Slaughter grows up on a tobacco farm in Southern Virginia in the 1940's in a abusive environment. She dreams that one day a man will come along to take her away, but when Aaron finally does, her new situation is even more trying than the life she is fleeing. The depiction of tobacco farming and the Southern conversations were written quite well and the decriptions of the abuse were so real and heart wrenching. It is a great book about a woman rising from the depths of despair and shows the restorative power of love.

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Good!, September 5, 2011

By 

judy reads - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Curing Season (Kindle Edition)

Because I am from the south; I found this book to be very interesting. I enjoyed this book, and I have recommended it to friends and family. The story of the abuse and degradation this woman endured from her "husband" was so real. I was glad to see her step up to the plate and felt the ending was as it should have been. Anyone out there that enjoys true southern fiction will find this story to be very good.