Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven [Paperback]

Karen Salyer McElmurray (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 4, 2004

This haunting debut novel invites us to explore the boundaries between beliefs, desires, obsessions, and madness. Karen Salyer McElmurray's story is set in Mining Hollow, Kentucky, where we meet Ruth Blue Wallen; her husband, Earl; and their son, Andrew. Ruth longs to know God, the only escape she can find in a world that has shown her spiritual, emotional, and sensual defeat. Earl yearns for the music-making of his past, now lost as he makes a living as a coal miner. Andrew desires the affection of a boyhood friend, an expression of love considered sinful in rural Kentucky. And with the divinely inspired yet tormenting help of his mother, in a world of deeply and tragically conflicting desires, Andrew must choose to live or die--he must choose an uncertain love or nothing at all.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

First novelist McElmurray vividly captures the harsh realities of God-haunted Eastern Kentucky in this intense, gloomy, multigenerational tale. Choice and the striving for redemption are her two irreconcilable yet knotted themes, the dual impulses at war in the Blue-Wallen family. Abandoned by her mother when she is 10, Ruth Blue lives for a dozen years alone with her father, Tobias, an itinerant preacher, gambler and drunk based in small-town Inez, Ky. At first she pins her hopes for deliverance on her husband, Earl Wallen, a WWII veteran who has abandoned his songwriting dreams for a job in the coal mines near Inez, but in time she realizes that "Tobias and Earl became the same to me, the same voices, saying Ruth do this and that, their shadows crossing each other on the kitchen floor." When her son, Andrew, is born, Ruth believes momentarily that she is biblically fulfilled, a giver of life. But when the mines shut down and she is forced to work as a maid to support the family, Ruth turns to an all-powerful God, eventually training her religious obsession on Andrew, who has grown up loving men. As the book begins, 30-year-old Andrew drives off for an evening with his lover, flamboyant Henry Ward. When he is back home in bed that night, his mother lays Earl's rifle beside him, instructing him to choose his destiny. Meanwhile, Ruth settles her own fate. Skipping back and forth in time, McElmurray sets herself the task of expressing the deepest truths of faith and human nature, relying on the power of symbols like music, postcards, moonlight, photos and water in her ambitious, stream-of-consciousness narrative. Though her prose is unevenAinspired in places and flat in othersAMcElmurray succeeds in conveying the enormity of choices made in a world governed by fervent beliefs. 16-city author tour. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Intense characterizations and strikingly apt imagery distinguish this lushly rhetorical first novel set in Kentucky's coal-mining region, the work of a prizewinning short-story writer. Nearly 60 years in the lives of the Wallens of Mining Hollow are portrayed through the juxtaposedand rather artily dreamlikenarratives of Earl Wallen, a veteran of Pearl Harbor, who ruefully describes himself thus: ``Has been singer and guitar player turned coal miner''; his wife Ruth and their adult son Andrew. Ruth has had an unhappy childhood made worse when her ``romantic, ostensibly artistic mother Stella runs off, leaving Ruth alone with her father, Tobias, who becomes a fundamentalist ``preacher of sorts.'' His inflamed religiosity will burden her even during her married life and will eventually, ironically, reclaim her. Andrew tells (unfortunately, in wispily lyrical fashion) how he gradually, guiltily recognized his homosexuality, loved and ``sinned'' with a handsome boyhood friend, and passively accepts his mother's passionate condemnation. These ``strange birds''(McElmurray's witty title has a surely unintended faintly condescending ring) are observed with scrupulously accurate period detail: the re-creation of the giddy, almost partylike atmosphere of the 1940s is especially convincing, as is the authors vivid account of ``the summer of the revival'' (1962, when Andrew first feels the stirrings of same-sex love). And she contrives several effective symbolic scenes, notably the depiction of a grieving hound bitch sorrowfully circling the freshly dug grave where her malformed, lifeless newborn pups lie buried. Only infrequently, as in a badly misconceived scene in a gay drag bar, does McElmurray lose control of her novel's tight design and emotional unity. Perhaps overindebted to such literary predecessors as Joyce Carol Oates's early novels and William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, but nevertheless a strongly imagined and skillfully executed debut performance. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press (October 4, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820326674
• ISBN-13: 978-0820326672
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,849,906 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Award Finalist, September 17, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven (Hardcover)

This complex and many-layered book was was 1 of 6 books nominated for the Appalachian Book of the Year Award. It should have won. Once Karen is discovered by the reading public, her books will win many awards. Buy this book. It will be with you long after you have read the last page.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a writer to watch--Genius at Work, May 18, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven (Hardcover)

Karen McElmurray is a writer's writer and a reader's writer. The lyrical and haunting power of her language and the truth she exposes to us in her storytelling is proof that indeed this is a writer to watch. There will only be more power and beauty issuing forth from her talent.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A former student of McElmurray..., August 8, 2002

By 

copro (charlotte, nc) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven (Hardcover)

...in great appreciation for a wonderful book. The broiling minds and pure intensity of the characters were, in my opinion, equal in complexity and raw emotionality to the characters of D.H. Lawrence, Ayn Rand - and that is what I seek out most in anything I read.