Marbles [Hardcover]

Oxford Stroud (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1991

Wise, funny, and utterly original, Marbles is the story of a who grows up in rural Alabama in the 1930s. He learns about life from a unique group of characters, including his zealous aunt (who is the town lush), his racy uncle (a WWI pilot), his best friend (a math and music whiz), and his first sweetheart, the minister's vestal daughter (who turns out to be anything but).

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

An offbeat, wondrously idyllic coming-of-age novel, this debut is set in rural Alabama in the 1930s and '40s, where Silas O'Riley Simeon (age 10 as the story opens) transcends his segregated community. His friendship with Blue Bobiden, a black yardboy, is built on equality. Silas, who learns to fly an uncle's biplane, also befriends a flimflamming mulatto midget, a refugee from a traveling circus where he'd posed as "Zulu, Wild Man of Zanzibar." The gracefully written adventure is peppered with spry humor, as when Aunt Rebecca, a pious Calvinist, is unmasked as a lush (she dies slipping into a goldfish pool) or when Silas's first attempt at lovemaking is cut short by a snooping raccoon. Hard reality intrudes when Silas goes off to WW II and his girlfriend, a preacher's daughter, turns out to be less than chaste. Stroud, who recently retired from teaching literature at Auburn University in Alabama, delineates a gallery of colorful characters who interact with one another in unpredictable ways.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A first novel that is no more than a loose arrangement of scenes from a Depression-era, Deep South childhood. Silas O'Riley Simeon describes some episodes in his life in the small town of Deen, Alabama, from fourth grade up to his 1944 departure for the war as a bombardier with the Army Air Corps. Silas, a white boy from a comfortably middle-class, Presbyterian family, is a marbles champion; he also has a figurative Jar of Marbles (the novel's central, albeit unconvincing, image), into which go those people whose lives seem entwined with his own. There is sweet blond Sylvia, the reverend's daughter who gives Silas his first kiss--in a chinaberry tree; his tender-hearted friend Shelly, the judge's son, a math whiz; and his other best friend Blue, the black yardboy (``he was my black poem, and I was the white paper he scribbled on''). The most outlandish ``marble'' is Zulu, a mulatto midget who is a circus performer and flimflam artist; after Zulu has conned the boys out of a hundred dollars, the Sheriff just beams and makes the midget his deputy. Similarly, when Silas steals his Uncle George's De Havilland to go joyriding, he escapes punishment from his uncle and the Sheriff, mellowed out on a bottle of Old Raven. Stroud pulls all his punches this way, as he projects an extraordinarily benign world; the strain becomes evident later on, as Sylvia has an unwanted pregnancy and abortion and Shelly, after being rejected by the military, commits suicide. The joys and terrors of childhood/adolescence dissolve in a kind of aw-shucks facetiousness: an unsatisfying debut. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 294 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt; 1st edition (October 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151570558
• ISBN-13: 978-0151570553
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,890,329 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Southern Fiction/Coming of Age tale set during WW 2, July 9, 2010

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kj (Orlando, Florida, USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Marbles (Paperback)

Having recently read a short story collection which included something penned by Oxford Stroud, I was eager to read more by this author. However, I had a dickens of a time finding this book! I finally ordered a used copy from Amazon.com and received a musty old copy with a goodwill sticker on the label; I wasn't anticipating much. Boy, was I wrong.

This is a delightful coming of age book set in the early 1940s south, about a boy and his townspeople - his fanatically religious Aunt, his best friend the math savant, his sometimes girlfriend(s), and other equally eccentric characters. It reminds me of Ferrol Sams with a little Carson McCullers thrown in.