Winter Run (Shannon Ravenel Books) [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Robert Ashcom (Author)

Book Description

Series: Shannon Ravenel Books | Publication Date: October 14, 2002

There are certain special—and rare— books that refresh our understanding of how children see the world. This is one of those books. It's the story of a boy growing up in a lost time in an idyllic place—rural Virginia of the late 1940s.

Charlie Lewis is the only child of city people who, after the war, choose to live at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains on a "gentleman's farm" near Charlottesville. Six years old when his family settles in the renovated corn crib on old Professor Jame's place, Charlie grows up in his personal version of heaven. His innocence is, of course, lost in the process. And so is his version of heaven.

But, as the old saying goes, still waters run deep, and Charlie runs deep, with a natural (almost supernatural) affinity for the land and its animals. For knowledge , he instinctively turns to a group of older black men, some of whom work the farm, others who are neighbors. Jim Crow laws and "the curse left on the land by slavery"—as old Professor James puts it—are still very much in evidence. Even so, Charlie's passions endear him to these men. They understand that he is lonely even if he does not. They watch out for him. And more—they love him.

Winter Run is a story that lets us escape for a moment our own noisy and complicated contemporary lives. Like The Red Pony, like Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, it takes us back to the joys of childhood's unrestricted enthusiasm and curiosity.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ashcom uses a young boys love of animals as the vehicle for a graceful, compassionate ode to farm life in a bygone era in his elegiac debut novel. The book revolves around the childhood of Charlie Lewis as he grows up on a Virginia farm in the 1940s, with each chapter constructed around a different incident involving the various farm animals and local critters. It takes a few chapters for Ashcom to find his prose rhythm, as he presents some background on Charlies father, a logger, and an episode of animal abuse by a neighbor that infuriates both the boy and the community. Next follow accounts featuring wild dogs and a boar, followed by the story of a hunt for a mysterious gray fox, and finally an especially touching yarn about the death of the family mule as Charlie goes to extraordinary lengths to give it a proper burial. The dark side of farm life is portrayed when a fire threatens the small town, but Ashcom balances that incident with a humorous story in which Charlie is given a pony that turns out to have a serious rebellious streak. The subtext of the book is the boys unique but understated relationships with the towns second-class African-American residents. Ashcom is a smooth, compassionate writer who displays a nice feel for nature, local color, his animal and human subjects (though strong female characters are noticeably lacking), and a flair for tweaking the heartstrings without crossing the line into mawkishness. This is more a collection of related stories than a true novel, but there's enough talent and charm in these rural yarns to mark Ashcom as a promising newcomer.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Soon after the end of World War II, Gretchen and Charles Lewis move with their son, Charlie, to a farm near the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. At age five, Charlie finds this rural setting to be heaven. The abundance of love and friendship from his mother, the old professor who lives in the big house, and the elderly Negro farmhand, Matthew, creates an idyllic world ripe for exploration. Learning country ways from Matthew and feeling compelled to make them his own, Charlie experiences firsthand the dangers of the hog lot, befriends a cranky mule for want of a horse to ride, and discovers his love for hunting dogs by adopting a stray and taking up 'possum hunting with Matthew's friends. Country life can be shockingly cruel, however, as Charlie discovers after an incident with a pack of wild dogs during a long, hard winter. Ashcom's first novel is a tender tale of discovery that will appeal to that special man with sensitivity, respect for life, and a love of God-a reader overlooked by popular literature. Recommended for public libraries.
Thomas L. Kilpatrick, formerly with Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: A Shannon Ravenel Book; 1 edition (October 14, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156512328X
• ISBN-13: 978-1565123281
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 4.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.2 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: #2,098,957 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A return to great literature, October 16, 2002

By 

Magnus Frangipani (Hood River, OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Winter Run (Shannon Ravenel Books) (Hardcover)

Robert Ashcom is a master of sewing magic and emotion into the English language.
His newest novel, WINTER RUN, invites readers to walk through rural Virginia in the 1940s. The story is set around Charlie, a curious, adventuresome boy (think Huck Finn) and his family, friends, animals and farm. It is with these aspects of life - family, friends and duty - that the proud young boy becomes a strong but sensitive man.
Now, most critics may associate 'rural' with boring, but not so in WINTER RUN. What audiences must pay attention to, in my opinion, is Ashcom's verbal sorcery.
He snaps photographs with words and tells fireside stories with narrative; his work commands the attention of anyone with serious interest in American literature.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The True and Forgotten Crops of Farming, October 5, 2003

By 

Larry T. McGehee (Spartanburg, SC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Winter Run (Shannon Ravenel Books) (Hardcover)

"What would you take to read if you were going to a desert island?" Shakespeare and the Bible usually head most quick lists, but more extended reflection usually hones in on categories. "Fiction?" "NonFiction?" "Poetry?" "Books?" "Magazines?"
We were reminded this week that William Faulkner's hunting stories are our continuing choice of fiction (or semi-fiction). Ever since we discovered them ("The Bear," "Delta Autumn," "The Old People," and the rest) over forty years ago, they have represented the essence of transcendentalism, the spiritualization of nature, the romanticizing of youthful innocence and of love of simplicity, and a vanishing rural southern landscape recalled and enshrined.
But we had not realized what a vacuum absorbing those stories long ago had left in our soul, what an ache and emptiness we felt because the link they expressed for us between youthful innocence and primitive woods had been left behind for decades, with no literary replacement in sight. Faulkner was gone, Eden had vanished, we had aged, the woods had been carved and asphalted and wired, and we had learned to live amidst modernity, masses, and motion.
The woods had been our first school, and being grown and gone from them, we learned to substitute real campuses for those vanished cathedrals. But it is not the same.
Sheerly by chance we lucked upon a little book by Robert Ashcom: Winter Run: Stories of an enchanted boyhood in a lost time and place (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2002). Ashcom is a farmer-writer in Warrenton, VA, who has been a school teacher, a breeder and trainer of thoroughbred horses, and master of hounds and huntsman for the Tryon Hounds in NC half an hour away from us.
Set in Virginia, probably near Charlottesville, Winter Run is the episodic account of the coming age of young Charlie Lewis in the post World War II years.
The stories are very Faulkneresque. Charlie Lewis, whom we watch grow (in wisdom, stature, curiosity, interests) from age six to fifteen, reminds us of Chuck Manson, and his black mentor, Matthew, is an evocation of Faulkner's Antaeus-like Ike McCaslin or Sam Fathers, stewards of the old ways at one with the land.
Each Ashcom story stands on its own merits, but all are linked through recurring central characters and the chronicle of Charlie's development and the presence of native storytellers. In assorted episodes, Charlie defies authority by facing down a huge boar in a pigpen, falls in love with a one-eyed mule, buries the mule, gets a pony, encounters a red-tailed hawk, watches his absentee executive father turn into a hero through conquering a roaring forest fire, hunts possums, learns about fox hounds, learns foxhunting, tracks and pets a gray vixen fox, learns about bird dogs, participates in November hog killings, captures a cottonmouth snake, and attends funerals of family and mentors.
But these are only the "occasions", milestones in a boy's evolution. What gives them meaning is author Ashcom's ability to turn commonplace and ordinary experiences into spiritual epiphanies, to see the meanings behind meanderings, to find divinity in dogs and dirt and drudgery.
If the evidence of God's working through seasons, land, rituals, mysteries of nature, and experienced parochial people is not clear enough to the reader, Ashcom makes it explicit in the final chapter, when an old Charlie, long gone from his farm and woods and influences, returns to the Episcopal chapel his father helped build.
In prose that can summons tears or laughter almost effortlessly, Ashcom succeeds in transforming what has to be his own story into fiction that rings of reality and emotions that all southern boys who are now old men will recognize. The ability to express for us sentiments and to find meanings often too deep for our own words makes Robert Ashcom a welcomed visitor in our lives.
Farmers have vanished (down to only two percent of the national work force), but what we belatedly have recognized is that the most important crops of the old farms was not tobacco, nor cotton, nor corn, nor livestock-but farmers, sturdy citizens whom Jefferson idolized and whom we can only remember wistfully.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A lovely book with moments of true grace, September 30, 2004

By 

J. Winn (Atlanta, Georgia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Winter Run (Shannon Ravenel Books) (Hardcover)

Reviewers often say of memoirs "It read like a well-crafted novel." This book is the opposite: a novel that reads like a well crafted memoir.

The writing is gorgeous and lush, and the story introduced me to Charlie, a child of city folks who move to the country in the 1940's. I was captured by his deep connection to the natural world and moved by the inevitable loss of his innocence. I highly recomend this rich and layered read.