Logic [Hardcover]

Olympia Vernon (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0802117716 | ISBN-13: 978-0802117717 | Publication Date: April 8, 2004 | Edition: First Edition

Olympia Vernon's fearless and wildly original debut novel, Eden, was hailed by critics. In her second novel, Logic, Vernon returns to the Deep South to conjure up a breathtaking and tremendously powerful story of a young girl's struggle to free herself from the unspeakable condition she refers to as "the butterflies floating inside" her. Thirteen-year-old Logic Harris almost died when she fell from a tree as a young girl. Since rescuing Logic that day, her mother, too, has secretly wished Logic had not survived the accident, and now ignores the increasingly apparent evidence of the aberrant attention Logic's father bestows upon his daughter. As she retreats to the Missis' house down the street where she works as a domestic, Logic's father withdraws further into paranoia, and Logic is left to navigate alone what she scarcely understands. Logic is populated with characters both strange and unmistakably real, all of them drawn with exquisite intensity. In inspired prose, stunning in its imaginative authority, Logic is a chilling allegory about the dangers of silence and a searing portrait of a girl lost in shame and fear, and a family and community too scarred by their own wounds to save her.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Vernon's follow-up to her acclaimed debut, 2003's Eden, is a dark and harrowing portrait of catastrophically scarred people in rural Valsin County, Miss. The sad story of Logic Harris, named after a word her mother saw in a magazine and pregnant by 13, will undoubtedly remind many readers of early Toni Morrison, particularly The Bluest Eye. Nearly killed as a child when she fell out of a tree, Logic is now "touched"-in every sense of the word: she "[doesn't] even talk in a straight line," and her father sexually abuses and impregnates her. But somehow, as Logic watches her neighbor's whoring and feels the growing "butterflies in her stomach," she retains an angelic innocence. All but abandoned by a used-up mother, who suffers "the drought of her wilted body" and secretly wishes her daughter dead, and an angry father teetering on the verge of insanity, Logic struggles to navigate the secrets and silences that have poisoned the adult world around her. Although Logic's hallucinogenic, disjointed outlook and language can be utterly incomprehensible at times, Vernon's alchemical imagination transforms passages that make no sense on their own ("a long death breathes nakedly behind the blood where red is turning sharp") into a whole as startlingly original, disconcerting and haunting as a fever dream.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The author of Eden (2002) offers another haunting, experimental novel set in a rural, mostly African American Mississippi community. "Too" Harris willfully blocks out the reality of what's happening in her family: her husband is routinely raping their daughter, Logic. Barely an adolescent and pregnant with her father's child, Logic has retreated into a nightmarish world of denial and symbolism. Surrounded by women--such as the prostitute across the street and the white woman for whom Too works--whose souls have been crushed by unspeakable violence, Logic turns for help to her only friend, a boy she calls the Tallest, the prostitute's son. When his help fails, Logic tries to find her own way out of misery. As in Eden, Vernon writes with astonishing, original poetry that finds the perpetrator and victim in everyone. Steeped in religious, surreal imagery and references to ordering principles--atoms, alphabets, life's basic materials--Vernon's abstract language examines the chances for survival in a lawless world where safety, love, and even joy are concepts, not realities. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; First Edition edition (April 8, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802117716
• ISBN-13: 978-0802117717
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,969,812 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars mesmerizing, June 11, 2004

By 

"tawanna_ott" (Louisiana) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Logic (Hardcover)

Once I started reading Logic, I couldn't put it down. Had I not had my family to take care of and work to go to, I would have finished it that same day I started. Olympia's writing guides you into a world of a young teenage girl being molested by her father and ignored by her mother. She spends her days with the old white lady across the street or her young transsexual friend who is also trying to discover who he is and how he fits into the puzzle that is their world. You want to make friends with the characters in Logic, to become bosom buddies and have them cry out all what's going on in their heads. I found myself wanting to step inside the book, wanting to kill the wimpy father and the mother for allowing him to hurt their daughter. Olympia's command of literary language is beautiful and raw. Her bluntness is refreshing and provokes you to tell the truth about everything rather than say what others want to hear. This is how powerful she is. She is truly an awesome writer. This book is a must read.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vernon Does It Again!, May 3, 2004

By 

"thammuzis1" (Hattiesburg, MS USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Logic (Hardcover)

Olympia Vernon is a national talent that continues to eclipse the reader's consciousness with dizzying word portraits that tell with resounding truth of lives experienced without pity. Logic, her latest work, employs characters that exist within worlds built upon memory, perception, and traditions steeped in the South and the Western religious perspective. Vernon's words do not simply rise from the page; they take flight as words dissolve into metaphorical and allegorical geographies of the mind. Told from the mind of a "retarded" girl too simple, yet too proud to regard herself as disabled, Logic's story is of the sensual and the tactile. The intimacy of flesh is revealed through the story, and Vernon does not allow the reader pause to reflect upon their pity for these characters. Instead, the beauty of Vernon's words is in the immediacy of their actions and visions. We are in the hands of a master storyteller whose characters will live unashamed within America's history of the inequities against ignorance, the poor, and the exploitation of the innocent.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hauntingly Powerful!, July 17, 2004

By 

Mahogany Book Club "Mahogany Media Review" (Albany, N.Y.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Logic (Hardcover)

Logic
Olympia Vernon 5 stars

Vernon has once again woven a hauntingly powerful story with Logic, taking us back to the Deep South. Logic is the story about a young girl named Logic who hasn't been right she fell from a tree. Her mother Too, wishes Logic died from the fall. Now Logic barely speaks she prefers to hum instead. Her father who seems to be lost in the traffic of his own mind has taken a keen interest in Logic, with a gentle tap on her knee he leads her time and time again to the operating room and has his way with her. Logic holds this secret that she refers to has the butterflies floating inside. Because what happens to little girl sometimes happens to their dolls Logic staples Celesta's mouth closed so she can't speak, so she can't tell.. Celesta also holds the secret of the operating room.
Too, who is unable to get her husband to touch her takes the record player into the bathroom and listens to the Johnson's, Robert Johnson, which brings to mind the blues legend that sold his soul to the devil. With the magic of her own hand, Too gets lost in the blues. Logic becomes friends with the boy across the way; she calls him " The Tallest". The town folks call him the elephant boy because of his protruding forehead. Raised by a prostitute the Tallest struggles with his own sexual identity.
I fell in love with little Logic and her wild ways. She captured my heart and I was struck with fear for her at times. I liked the friendship of Logic and the Tallest, two outcasts lost in their own worlds.
Vernon's story of the strange happenings in the Deep South is powerful. The characters haunting. An even blend and well-balanced story that lingers in the mind.

Reviewed by
Dawn
Mahogany Book Club
(...)