A Song for Alice Loom [Paperback]

Scott Ely (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2006

Fiction. Charlene is an underground dump fire. Louis Sabine is a dead Marine who played the sax. Together, can they help end racial tension building in Pine, after the needless death of a young mother and her daughter, plus the savage murder of an aunt whose voodoo was inflaming matters? Can they save the Looms and the Sabines, historically white and black families, who have interbred? Can they restore any semblance of love?

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Southern literary novelist Ely (Eating Mississippi, 2005) once again returns to Mississippi, employing a smoldering landfill fire, a mosquito-infested river, and the voice of a dead marine in his overheated yet thoroughly engrossing portrayal of racial tension. The Looms, white property owners, have a long, complicated history with their black tenants, the Sabines. Alice Loom has a daughter by Louis Sabine, a dead marine who speaks to her from his burial site on Iwo Jima. He sends her a message about her racist, greedy brother, Wendell, whose sense of entitlement has led him to commit murder. Now Wendell intends to hunt down and kill 10-year-old Larue Sabine, who witnessed the gruesome killing, but Wendell has underestimated both the integrity of his siblings and the power of the unseen forces aligned against him. Some of author Ely's more exaggerated touches, including Louis' crackling, quivering gravesite, threaten to tip the story right over. Yet, in the main, his lurid plot seems to be the perfect vehicle for his larger theme of the ugliness of racial hatred. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Scott Ely was born in Atlanta, Georgia but moved at an early age to Jackson, Mississippi where he received his MA in English from the University of Mississippi. Later he received an MFA from the University of Arkansas. He now teaches fiction writing at Winthrop University in South Carolina. Ely has published two novels, Starlight and Pit Bull, with Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Penguin. He has published two collections of short stories: Overgrown with Love from The University of Arkansas Press and The Angel of the Garden from The University of Missouri Press. One of his stories has been included in New Stories from the South. A story will be included in a forthcoming University of Georgia Press anthology, After O'Conner: Contemporary Georgia Stories. He is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and a Rockefeller Fellowship to Bellagio, Italy.

Product Details

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: Livingston Press (January 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931982767
• ISBN-13: 978-1931982764
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,462,632 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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