Customer Reviews

The Flower of Grass: A Novel

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Life's about living out what's in front of you, and trying to
accept whatever life brings us, one day at a time, as a gift." John
Allen had rushed home as fast as he could, but he was too late. He
missed talking to his father face to face one last time. He wasn't
ready to face his home and the woman he left behind. He has been
clean and sober for about a year now. He was ready - or so he thought
until he got there. It felt like nothing had changed, but at the same
time everything had changed.

Fear, shame, failures and memories flooded his mind. He wasn't
prepared for the memories that hit him when he moved into his father's
cabin; nightmares of his childhood and other demons haunt him there.
This was the pain that made him leave home in the first place. He
thought he had dealt with these demons, but here they were, up close
and personal and on a new level. Can he get through this sober? He
didn't have good feelings about this. Then there is Jessie, the love
of his life. The love that he left behind. He just wants to talk with
her and say he's sorry and finally say goodbye. She deserved that
much. They just needed to clear the air so that they both could move
on. It's been many years, many broken promises. She was married now.
He knew that, but they still needed to talk.

Maybe it would be best to send a note to Jessie. This way he wouldn't
invade her space and it would be her choice to contact him. After
all, Jessica has been married 6 years. He just thought he would say
he's sorry and try to explain. He had written her letters in the past
he just couldn't mail them. Jessie is not the only one that he's hurt
in his absence. His siblings share their own pain with him and what
they have been through since he was gone.

This book is powerful and very real in its message. This is a slice
of life that shows lost love and the bitter affects that addiction has
on everyone's life. Johnny returns home to something he didn't
expect; he is welcomed with open arms and he didn't deserve any of it!
He had left so much behind - the ones he loved are the same people he
couldn't face because of what he had become. They showed him a love he
didn't deserve. It was almost overwhelming. He had learned that "life
can be so cruel and mean" - pain is part of life. Without pain, I
reckon we might take all the beauty for granted. Then love finds us.
Love was new for Johnny.

Johnny finally comes to the conclusion that "No one person can save
us. Only Jesus can." Johnny also realizes when he says "Something
happened to me; I lost who I really was, lost everything true. You
wouldn't have liked me. " That's why he stayed away. But, none of his
past seemed to matter to his family and friends.

Johnny has to face the pain of his childhood and the stronghold his
father has on him even from the grave. Will Johnny let his heavenly
Father love him totally? Will he believe what his heavenly Father
says about him or will he still buy in to all the lies? Can he walk in
what Jesus says about him and love?

You will be powerfully moved by this story. It will get you thinking
about the real meaning of love and life. I can't wait to see what
James Robinson will write about next.

Nora St.Laurent- Book Club Servant Leader
www.psalm516.blogspot.com

I have never read a book quite like this one. It extracted emotions from me that I thought were gone. It's an awesome story and very well written. It certainly could be real life! I'm going to reccomend it to my friends!
Good Book, well worth your time. I can hardly wait for the sequel!?!

If you have a heart, you'll love this book. Both real-to-life in its subject matter, and artistic in its imagery, you'll be drawn into the lives of Robinson's characters the moment "the man (drives) across the bridge" and will leave their hometown of Tranquility with your heart soaring. If his first fictional offering is any indication, I hope this author will be around for a long time to come.

I loved the Flower of Grass! It is a beautiful story about how our thoughts and feelings of love are always in the changing context of our life histories. Change sometimes happens when we aren't paying attention. This is true for Jessie. She loves John, but really in the same way that she loved him at 17--when he left her in the small town of Tranquility. She talked herself into hating John, but in the back of her heart, she held on to his memory. Tuck, she loves as a mature woman in the context of their life together, which she comes to understand as the more valuable love. However, she doesn't come to this insight without the reappearance of John and further reflection and pain.

While I connected more with Jessie, I appreciated John's struggle with his own family story. He did wrestle with his demons while in Tranquility (a pretty safe place that Tranquility) and left after coming to terms with some of his family drama (can't say we ever resolve all of it). And, here is the best part; he left with hope for his own future!

My favorite books are those that pull emotion out of me. If I laugh, cry, and become involved in the characters and their lives, then it is a keeper. The Flower of Grass is a wonderful story that had me crying with sadness, crying with joy, and crying for the peace that can be ours.

The Flower of Grass - Rarely do I find a book that captures my heart so much that I cannot wait to get home from work to continue reading. Jim's magical writing brought all my senses alive, passionately walking me through the lives of John, Jessie, Tuck, and their families. With hope, originality, and reality, Jim has created an ethereal reading experience with his gift of writing that will be sure to touch your heart in a special and unique way.
The Flower of GrassPostcardsFuse of ArmageddonThe Shack

Jim Robinson's novel tells a story filled with vivid images, memorable characters, and most moving of all, an emotional eloquence that will speak to the reader long after he or she turns the last page. There is a kind of internal resonance here that I like. Turns in the plot related to loss and grief and addiction made me keep wondering what happens next, followed by a satisfying redemption in the end. There is a depth of spirituality in the characters, too, that doesn't preach but certainly inspires. This kind of writing does more than impress with its elegance, it touches the heart.

This book was my local library's Reading Club selection for September. That's why I read it. That's the only reason I read it. I'll state right up front that I am a recovering alcoholic, and I had an abusive father (though nowhere near the demon of a father you'll discover in these pages). He abandoned my family when I was five then had the audacity to return five years later. We never had anything like a close relationship. Late in his life I thought I was going to have a chance to try and work some things out with him, but he died before that happened. It left me with, oh, a couple of tons of issues. You think I wanted to read a book about a prodigal son who comes home too late to settle things with his own father? No way. I read it, though, against all my will. But, I'll willingly re-read it many times because of the truths and the lessons I discovered, in spite of myself, in it.

As it nearly turned out, I almost didn't finish the book. I was openly weeping (and I'm a 58-year old man who's seen his share of bad stuff) by the 2nd page. And that was just the Prologue! Heck, I'm getting a little misty just writing this review. But I held in there, and I'm so glad I did.

Robinson has accomplished something of a magic trick, here, a bit of literary slight-of-hand. He gives us a haunting love story (between John and Jessie), but he tells it through the eyes of a 2nd, and haunted, love story (between John and his father), in a novel built around contrast and contradiction. The "hero", John Allen, has his head quite irrevocably planted in the clouds. The "heroine", Jessie Tucker, has her feet just as firmly planted in the soil, in the land that has both nourished her and worn her down her entire life. John's father, who was buried 2 days before John makes it home, but who appears to John in several dreamlike sequences, is a contradiction: an alcoholic, he was kind and loving when sober, but horribly monstrous when drunk. In one particularly wrenching sequence, John sits on the porch with the ghost of his sober father:


"'I'm glad you're here, Daddy. I like it when you're like this, when we're together like this.'

'Me, too, son,' the man said, rocking, sober and serene. 'Let's you and me just sit like this a while.'

The boy felt wrapped in a kind of comfort he wished would last forever. A warm wind moved in the trees.

'Maybe he won't come back, Daddy," the boy said at last, and he meant it with all his heart. 'The mean one.'

'Maybe not, son.'

'I hate him. I hate that man, Daddy.'

The man rocked and watched the woods. His hands lay big but gentle on the gun.

'I hate him, too, son. I hate him, too.'"


John Allen, a successful novelist, has come home (to a small Southern town named Tranquility - an ironic name, considering how so few people who live there actually have any) after 16 years away, ostensibly to say goodbye to his father, but he is too late for that. However, he also has hopes, half-hidden even from himself, of re-kindling a love affair with Jessie, the girl he left behind. Jessie, after waiting 10 years for John to come home, has gone on to marry Tuck, a good, solid man whom she truly loves. But John was and remains the love of her life, and now she finds herself faced with the most difficult choice of her life. As for John, he has spent his life comparing every woman he has known to Jessie and found them wanting. He has come to believe that only she can fulfill his desire for love and anything like a normal life. But, as his father's ghost informs him - "'I've told you many times, it's wantin' that gets us in trouble. A man can be at peace until he starts wantin' something.'"

The characters in this novel are deeply real, and I came to care greatly for them. They are terribly flawed, but they are capable of learning and growing, and they do so, though at often great personal cost. The healthiest among them are Ellen, John's teenage niece by his sister Maggie; she already is showing she has her uncle's gift of creativity, but, hopefully without the accompanying dreaminess; and, interestingly enough, Joey, John's hard-drinking, pill-popping, brother, who won't clean his mobile home, and who absolutely refuses to grow up. These two seem to know, each in his or her own way, all they need to about what and where home is and what it takes to live there.

Because, ultimately this novel is about home, or the search for it, and the finding of it, or not. In real life, some of us discover that even a small, dying Southern town (of which the South is, sadly, far too full) can be home. Some of us, unfortunately (or maybe not) never find a place to call home, or, if we do, we find a way to lose it. And you know what they say about going home again.

I don't want anyone to think I'm giving this novel high marks because its story is in so many ways mine. True, it is, and, true, I currently live about 17 miles from the small, Southern town where the author was raised, and upon which, in small part at least, he based the setting for the novel. Yes, those things brought me resonance and gave the book a certain, and personal power. But I'm a good enough, and a long-time-enough reader to recognize good literature when I come across it, whether by force or not.

No, I loved this work for the beauty of its lush, lyrical prose, its honesty, its character development, and the truths it tells. For example, not only do we learn, from Ellen, that, "'Love...is fierce. True love is never safe, Johnny. Love is the riskiest thing there is.'" But we also, through Johnny, learn that, "Perhaps he could be loved." That is arguably the hardest lesson for any human to learn - that it's not only possible, but ok to be loved.

Robinson has written a slim but huge novel, in a style that, sadly, has gone out of vogue in recent years. That is the so-called Southern fiction style of writing, in which descriptive narrative is highly prevalent, actually a kind of character in and of itself. Granted, it's a more liesurely form of writing, and not for everyone. But if you really like good writing, and strong character and story, I can't recommend this book highly enough.

I certainly await with great anticipation more work from this author.

This is one of the BEST debut novels I've ever read. You'll find hints of Steinbeck with a touch of Zora Neale Hurston. The book's epigraph, by poet Z. Bryan Haislip, sets the lovely pace for this book:

The grace of grass growing she has;
Of leaves blowing, of daisies bowed
Before the rain. Clouds at morning
Have such a sweet simplicity.
Her feet go laughing everywhere.
There are not birds so blithely free,
So singing quick, so apt as she.
I love her April ways. I pray
She may not change. As now she is
I have asked heaven to keep her.

All in all, James Robinson has established a unique fiction voice for "smart" readers. If you're looking for something light and fluffy, this is NOT the book for you. The Flower of Grass holds sway over you in the forgotten manner of Hemingway and Faulkner. It's deep and wide and goes great with a fireplace and a glass of Merlot.

Readers who enjoy Michael Ondaatje and Cormac McCarthy will surely enjoy Jim Robinson.

This powerful novel deals with themes of bereavement, addiction, and lost love but through them Robinson manages to weave a wonderfully healing story.

I was drawn into the drama though the author's poignant prose and imagery and loved the way he allowed me to experience both the pain of existence and the hope of redemption through his characters. Robinson's writing kept me transfixed; I wanted to be in the story, to experience the place and the people. To borrow the words of his character "Miss Ruth," this book "had considerable beauty in it. Considerable beauty."

THE FLOWER OF GRASS is both tragic and triumphant. Its surprise ending left me with the assurance that healing of deep soul wounds is possible for all of us; what we need to truly be whole comes from the truth we hold within.

--Sharon Fawcett, author of Hope for Wholeness: The Spiritual Path to Freedom from Depression

"The Flower of Grass" is Robinson's first novel, but the characters feel as real and true as those in his memoir, "Prodigal Song." I'm convinced I could drive through Tennessee, over a bridge and into the town of Tranquility to meet them in person. Oh, how I wish I could. Robinson did a masterful job of giving life to this cast and artfully mirrored nature's ruthlessness and resilience throughout their lives. By the end of the story I was heartbroken to turn the last page and have to say good-bye.