Wild Blue Yonder [Hardcover]

William Price Fox (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2002

Earl Edge, a 16-year-old small-town troublemaker, has police and truant officers on his trail, and few options other than to lie about his age and join the Air Force. What follows is a tale of bitterly earned growth, of sweetness and cruelty, of friendship formed and lost.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

William Price Fox is the author Doctor Golf, Ruby Red, Dixiana Moon, and Southern Fried Plus Six. He has taught at the University of South Carolina and the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Crane Hill Publishers (January 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1575871971
• ISBN-13: 978-1575871974
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,088,220 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Very little new here, January 5, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Wild Blue Yonder (Hardcover)

This is basically a stretching-out of two of his earlier short stories, "Dear
Diary" and "Dear Diary: Wanda" which were published as part of "Southern Fried Plus Six" in the late Sixties. If you've read those, you've seen pretty much everything in "Wild Blue Yonder." A high school dropout enlists in the Air Corps and various things happen pretty much the same way they did in the earlier stories - training, a bar fight in Texas, the girls he and his buddies meet in town and their night out, he's just adding to old stuff that he's said before. A couple of examples:

From "Dear Diary":
"Had lunch. Good food. Had two helpings of everything. Nice cut of ham with raisin sauce. Potatoes, beans, ice cream and coffee."

From "Wild Blue Yonder":
"Same day 1830 hours. Great food for supper. Nice cut of ham with raisen sauce. Raisen e or i? ...Had two helpings of everything. Except ice cream."

Now, I have been a Fox fan for quite awhile, long enough to have had a copy of "Southern Fried" since the Seventies and to remember big chunks of it, but I have to say I was thoroughly
disappointed with "Wild Blue." I bought it at the Southern Festival of Books, a big literary gathering that happens in Nashville every fall, and meant to go hear Fox speak at one of the authors' forums and maybe even get him to sign this, but I managed to miss his appearance and it's probably just as well. It's actually quite a good story if you haven't read those two from "Southern Fried," but if you have you can see everything coming before Fox says it and the book's not nearly as interesting.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superbly written, semi-autobiographical novel, October 9, 2002

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wild Blue Yonder (Hardcover)

Wild Blue Yonder is a superbly written, semi-autobiographical novel by William Price Fox which is set in 1943 South Carolina, and is about Earl Edge, a 16-year-old truant and small town trouble maker who sees no way out of his problems than to lie about his age and join the air force. Wild Blue Yonder is highly recommended as a coming of age saga told largely in the form of the protagonist's journal entries of change, hardship, the loss of friends, and surviving the perils of World War II.

4 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A Lousy Writer Who's Lucky to Have a Job, May 14, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Wild Blue Yonder (Hardcover)

The man hasn't written a decent story since the 1960s, before he failed as a screenwriter in Hollywood. After failing as a writing professor at the University of Iowa, he had the good sense to land a teaching position at the University of South Carolina, in his home town. Fox has been hanging around the university hitting on coeds like an unwelcome drunk at a purple jesus party ever since.