Only Great Changes [Paperback]

Meredith Sue Willis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1997

Born in a small town in West Virginia, Blair Ellen Morgan yearns for something she cannot name. Inspired by a speaker from the small Christian college in the same range of hills as her home, she joins VISTA to work for a year in an inner city neighborhood in Norfolk, Virginia.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Authors....pretend to write about all of life, but mostly they opt for the excitement. It takes talent, observation, and a particular caring to bring the average person's experience to life in a book. Willis does it here, making gold out of common materials. There are indications that she is not done with Blair Ellen yet, and I can't wait for the alchemy of her next book. -- The Plain Dealer, March 11, 1985

Take a half dozen of the novelists who routinely show up as repeaters on the best- seller lists, ask them to put their united talents into one collaboration, and the chances are they couldn't write a page which Meredith Sue Willis couldn't do better. She would beat them with the acuteness of her eyes and ears, her unfaltering way of bringing the fruits of her observation alive on paper and her sure sense of where to look in the crannies of human affairs for the materials of drama. -- New York Newsday, February 3, 1985

Willis makes a familiar story fresh and engaging with her wise perceptions and unusual language. -- San Francisco Chronicle, December 23, 1984

From the Publisher

Appearing for the first time in a trade paperback edition, the second novel of Meredith Sue Willis' Blair Morgan trilogy takes Blair into the tensions and excitement of an inner city neighborhood during the years of the War on Poverty. Critically well-received when first published by Charles Scribner's Sons, Hamilton Stone is delighted to make this novel available again in a matched set with its two companion novels.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Hamilton Stone Editions; 2nd edition (March 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0965404315
• ISBN-13: 978-0965404310
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,129,767 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Meredith Sue Willis grew up in West Virginia where her parents were both teachers. She has degrees from Barnard College and Columbia University, and her fiction has been published by Scribners', HarperCollins, West Virginia University Press, Mercury House, Ohio University Press, and others. Her book of literary short stories, In the Mountains of America, was praised in the New York Times Book Review as "a[n]...important lesson on the nature and function of literature itself." Her novels for children are Billie of Fish House Lane, The Secret Super Powers of Marco and Marco's Monster.

Her latest books are Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel, and a new collection of Appalachian short stories, Out of the Mountains.

She lives in South Orange, New Jersey where she keeps a four season organic garden and is active in local racial integration politics as well as teaching writing in the schools and at New York University.