From Publishers Weekly
"Children grow crooked when they live in a house that's unnatural," Queen Ester tells her grown, estranged daughter, Helene Strickland. Three generations of crooked children grow into complex women in Reynolds's debut novel, a winding journey through black Southern culture and history as viewed through the warped lens of one family's struggles. Queen Ester's mother, Liberty, is abandoned as a girl and grows up picking cotton on tenant farms. In 1930, she starts a cafe in Lafayette County, Ark., and takes in a charming drifter, neglecting her daughter, Queen Ester, who becomes strange and reclusive. Queen Ester, in turn, is forced to give up her own daughter, Helene, born out of wedlock. In 1976, Helene, who now works at a nursing home in Washington, D.C., comes back to Lafayette County for a funeral and to seek answers about her past. But the crafty, childlike Queen Ester instead feeds her lies and half-truths, circling around the family's story, but never quite reaching its sordid center. The large cast of characters navigate myth and history, including the indignities of the sharecropper system and a disastrous 1927 flood in Mississippi. Through flashbacks and hinted connections, the family's secrets are gradually revealed. Though the tangled, self-consciously Faulknerian narration occasionally leaves the reader as lost as Helene, and last-minute attempts to tie together loose ends feel hasty and cosmetic, Reynolds's talent for fluent, colloquial dialogue provides relief. It is the characters themselves who hold the readers' attention in the end, as they simultaneously cling to and wound one another.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
In August of 1987, Helene Strickland travels from Washington, D.C., to a small, rural, black town in Lafayette County, Arkansas, for her Aunt Annie B's funeral and to reunite with her mother, who didn't raise her. The novel takes place in a single day but spans four generations in flashbacks in which Helene's mother, grandmother, father, Uncle Ed, and Aunt Annie B slowly unfold family secrets. Helene is the last remnant of the unholy trinity of her mother, Queen Ester; her grandmother, Liberty; and her father, Chess. Deserted by her husband, Liberty lives independently with her daughter, Queen Ester--who is rendered eternally childlike by her mother's doting. When wayward Chess arrives, haunted by his own murky past, the three develop an unhealthy dependency that eventually compels Liberty to send Helene away to be raised by distant relatives. Reynolds' first novel is a haunting account of a mother's obsessive love and a daughter's demented love.
Vanessa BushCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
