From Publishers Weekly
The studiously simple prose of her first novel is probably Johnson's attempt to invest her short narrative with the quality of a country story told by plain folks. But the touches of dialect are not enough to add color to a generally bland and uninteresting tale. The heroine is Cindy, who in the midst of the Depression lives with her husband, J.D., and their baby daughter, Callie, in a rough house on a North Carolina tobacco farm that's been in J.D.'s family for generations. Only one other family dares to live in Half Moon Pocosin, because folks believe the lonely marshland is haunted. Cindy wouldn't be living there either, if she'd had her way. Her dream was to be a schoolteacher, but her parents pressured her into marrying J.D., a scarecrow of a fellow whose hair always pokes straight up "like weeds on the edge of a wood's fire.'' Slogging her way from one farm chore to another (most of them described in detail), Cindy yearns over a traveling shoe salesman named Sam, tries to find time to read whenever possible and dreams of escape. The ghosts of the women who lived and died in the 'cosin before her watch and wait and hope she'll have the courage they lacked. Concentrating on the monotony of Cindy's life, this novella may ring true as a description of backcountry existence, but it lacks the spark of imagination required to turn dull reality into compelling fiction.
Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
