A Small Harvest of Pretty Days [Paperback]

Larry Kimport (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2007

In 1890s Pennsylvania, lonesome Clara Waltz falls in love with an aging drifter whom she rescues from a world far stranger than her own.

Editorial Reviews

Review

...a page-turner of a novel as gripping as it is harrowing. -- Tony D'Souza, author of Whiteman and The Konkans

...about a grown up Huck Finn...All together, a rich mix for fiction readers... -- Betsy Rider, The Williamsport Sun-Gazette, Williamsport, Pennsylvania

I enjoyed reading the book a great deal...it would adapt well as a...TV movie. Very well done! -- Liz, Booksville Literary Review

From the Publisher

Larry Kimport, a native of north-central Pennsylvania, uses this setting for his novel, A Small Harvest of Pretty Days. This tender love story is a first person narrative told through the voice of an older woman, Clara Waltz, and opens as she relates the events of her twenty-ninth year, when she and her illegitimate daughter, Emma, lived as domestic help to a prominent Pennsylvania family in 1890.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 188 pages
• Publisher: Foremost Press (April 4, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0978970446
• ISBN-13: 978-0978970444
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,802,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars interesting combination of elements, March 25, 2008

By 

A. D. Cox (northern PA, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A Small Harvest of Pretty Days (Paperback)

Imagine this recipe: you take the tone of a classic story like "Little House on the Prairie"; the voice of a woman like Marty, of Janette Oke's "Love Comes Softly" series; set her down in north central Pennsylvania just as the 1800's become the 1900's. Then, add in a character who just may be the Huckleberry Finn, after several decades of wandering and mellowing, and for a finishing touch, give it just a hint of "Jane Eyre". You just might end up with something that tasted like Larry Kimport's "A Small Harvest of Pretty Days."

The book hooks the reader at the beginning with a plot device unusual for this type of story - Clara, the first-person narrator, describes how the first time she saw the man she came to know as Mr. Finley, she was running for her life. In the opening scene, Clara hints at how she knows, from personal experience, that the man she was running from meant her harm. As she hides inside a fallen tree - and this is a nice touch, since the trees of that era were big enough for a grown person to fit inside - she witnesses a murder. From my perspective, the questions surrounding this murder continue to pull the reader through the story, and change it from just another novel for the historical fiction shelves.

Indeed, Kimport blends the techniques and topics of contemporary fiction with the milieu and voice of a bygone era. The setting of the Twin Tiers (that's northcentral PA and southcentral NY, to those of you outside the area) in the 1890's is effectively woven into Clara's story, using details of the chores of daily life, the discussions on the lumber business heard around the dinner table with important male guests, the descriptions of clothing and tools, the leisure activities of the well-to-do, and the hardships of most travel. Occasionally, this historical setting and the voices of the characters are out-of-sync with the frank discussion of rape and murder that drives the plot. Nevertheless, Kimport is usually able to smooth this over by prefacing these revelations with how utterly Clara's life is devastated by her experience and the community's opinion of her as a result, or by having male characters say, "we shouldn't be talking about this gruesome murder in the presence of women and children."

"A Small Harvest of Pretty Days" is marketed as a fictional love story, and as a "what-if" sequel to Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." While those ingredients are in there, that's not the strongest flavor. I felt the author did a better job evoking rural America at the turn of the last century, and of leaving the "why" of the murder open. I was more intrigued with the information on the railroads coming through the Williamsport area, and the lumber being moved down the Susquehanna River, and the day-to-day activities necessary for running a farm. The development of the love story and the mystery as to whether or not Mr. Finley was Huck Finn were a little obvious to me, although the love story is nice in and of itself. Any fan of Janette Oke or Lori Wick or Judith Pella's Christian historical romances will enjoy this aspect of Kimport's novel. And I did like reading a love story that wasn't all convoluted with war stories, or full of vampires, for once. What kept me reading, however, was wanting answers to the same questions that bothered Clara - why would this seemingly nice man, this Mr. Finley who was so kind and helpful to her, kill a man? And why didn't it seem to bother him? Was he responsible for the other brutal murders that were shocking the entire area?

The answer is a creative one, and doesn't resolve until near the end of the book, in just the plot structure your junior high English teacher explained to you. I found the resolution, as well as the epilogue of Clara's life, ultimately quite satisfying. At 181 pages, and reasonably priced at $12.97, I'd recommend Kimport's book to any reader looking for a good recipe with more to it than expected.

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful Read, June 30, 2007

By 

cruiser59 - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Small Harvest of Pretty Days (Paperback)

This was a wonderful tale back in a simpler time. Larry Kimport does a great job of keeping you in suspense as the plot thickens until the end.
The book was hard to put down.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars murder mystery in 1890's Pennsylvania, July 26, 2008

By 

George "Hombre" (Sarasota, FL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Small Harvest of Pretty Days (Paperback)

Larry Kimport's second novel, "A Small Harvest of Pretty Days," is a letter from a time, way of life, and mode of storytelling that evokes the best of turn-of-the-century Americana easily sentimentalized in lesser hands. But Kimport manages to transport us to 1890's Pennsylvania with relatively little overt façade; he taps the reservoir of this lost world in his first few paragraphs and offers a page-turner of a novel as gripping as it is harrowing. What Kimport does so well is what the great novelist constantly referenced in his book--Mark Twain--became the first American master of: characterization. Kimport's narrator and protagonist, Clara Waltz, is as rich and subtle a heroine as any of the myriad folk Twain so precisely drew as to carve them onto our collective consciousness. Indeed, it is impossible not to talk about Kimport and Twain in the same breath in the context of this book, because Huck Finn, Twain's greatest character of all, becomes an actual, indeed central, player in its pages.
At its heart, "A Small Harvest of Pretty Days" is a murder mystery in period dress. Narrated through the confessional prism of time, the book opens with Clara being followed by a couple of "brutish looking" men on "our frozen road to Montoursville,"another of the small, conservative lumber towns that dotted the Susquehanna Valley. One of the men participated in a brutal gang-rape of Clara a decade before, a rape that resulted in Clara's conceiving twins, one of whom she lost in birth, and the other, her daughter Emma who has since accompanied her in her life of marginalization, menial labor, and shame.
For after her rape, Clara did not go quietly about her business as the mores of her time wanted her to do, but leveled her finger directly at her attackers, some of who were upstanding and prosperous members of the community. Instead of coming together to bring Clara justice, the people of the valley did to Clara what the people of Puritan Boston did to Hester Prynne: they place the blame on her.
Kimport has a gift for action, and the bodies pile up quickly. The first to go is a horse, its neck cut open by a stranger's knife, and the second is its rider--Clara's principle attacker, Horace Wills--killed and stuffed through a hole in the river ice. Clara, hiding at the roadside during these events, manages to witness the face of the man exacting revenge upon her enemies: the aging Hank Finley, an itinerant laborer who has recently drifted into the area, and who circumstance and suspicion begin to hint to Clara may in fact be the legendary Huckleberry Finn. Both Clara and Hank become prime suspects in the mounting murders, and their constant persecution by the area constables brings them together to the very precipice of love. When a traveling circus comes to town with, as the barker boasts, "[T]he grown-up man of Huckleberry Finn!! And his most faithful, most true companion, the Nigger Jim!!" among its cast, the novel reaches its boiling point, and what Clara and reader both must know-- `Is Hank Finley really Huck Finn?'--is revealed in a dramatic twist that even Mark Twain couldn't have penned.
A dark and brooding book that meditates on love in those years beyond youth and illusion, "A Small Harvest of Pretty Days" will satisfy readers fascinated with a culture, historical period, and most importantly a morality, that exacted its bitter social punishment on those least deserving of any punishment at all.