A World Made of Fire [Kindle Edition]

Mark Childress (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

"Mark Childress is an artist with an ear comparable to Eudora Welty's. I haven't read a Southern novel since Losing Battles that has given me such pleasure.” - Harper Lee. An extraordinary burst of praise greeted Mark Childress's enthralling first novel, "A World Made of Fire." Set in Alabama at the turn of the century, it tells the story of Callie Bates and her adoring children; the preacher-husband leaving in a buggy after the wedding and returning with spiteful sermons about the children Callie gives birth to year after year in his absence. It is the story of the secret visitor who is the radiant element of Callie's life; of the tragic Christmas Day of 1909; and of the children who survive it - Jacko, believed to have magical powers because he was saved from the fire in his mother's arms, and young Stella, blighted by the sorrow she has witnessed. The poetic, non-comic novel that launched the career of the author of "Crazy in Alabama" and "One Mississippi."

From the Inside Flap

"The ambivalence of fire--as evocation of glowing love and furious destruction--permeates this stunning first novel by Mark Childress, a young Southern writer who gives fresh expression to his region's literary preoccupations. A World Made of Fire is set in rural Alabama in the decades before World War I . . . Childress has created a wholly believable world. The landscapes are forceful and the characters deeply felt. . . . A World Made of Fire probes varieties of tenderness and love, principally from the viewpoint of [a] young girl, Estelle Bates, whose literary forebears include Lena Grove in Faulkner's Light in August. . . .Childress dramatically traces her course, keeping the violent and the tender elements in a tense, remarkably effective balance. . . . Reading it is rather like staring for a good long while into the coals of a fire; in that concentration of energy, many things can be learned."
--Newsday

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Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 506 KB
• Publisher: Overture Books; 3 edition (May 9, 2008)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B00198R1IQ
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #42,398 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

More About the Author

Mark Childress is the author of seven novels: GEORGIA BOTTOMS (coming from Little, Brown in February 2011), ONE MISSISSIPPI, GONE FOR GOOD, CRAZY IN ALABAMA, TENDER, V FOR VICTOR, and A WORLD MADE OF FIRE.

Born in Monroeville, Alabama - the same town Harper Lee wrote about in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD - Childress is one of three sons of Roy and Mary Helen Childress. Roy was a salesman for Ralston Purina, so the family moved a lot growing up: Ohio, Indiana, Mississippi, and Louisiana were some of the stops along the way.

Childress attended Clinton (Miss.) High School and the University of Alabama, where he studied fiction writing under Barry Hannah and Carole Johnson. He worked as a staff writer for the Birmingham (Ala.) News, and was Features Editor of Southern Living magazine and National Editor of The Atlanta Journal and Constitution before becoming a full-time novelist.

His articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Times of London, San Francisco Chronicle, Saturday Review, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Travel and Leisure, and other national and international publications.

"Tender," a Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club selection, was named to several Ten Best of 1990 lists, and appeared on many national bestseller lists. "Crazy in Alabama," a featured selection of the Literary Guild, has been published in eleven languages and appeared on many bestseller lists and Ten Best of 1993 lists. "Crazy" was named The (London) Spectator's "Book of the Year" for 1993 and a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year," and was on the Spiegel bestseller list in Germany for 10 months.

"One Mississippi" was a BookSense Notable Book of the Year, nominated for SIBA Book of the Year,and appeared on the "hot summer book" lists of Good Morning America, People, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, O: the Oprah Magazine, and the New York Public Library. The paperback edition is now in its seventh printing.

Childress has also written three picture books for children, "Joshua and Bigtooth," in 1992, "Joshua and the Big Bad Blue Crabs," 1996 (both from Little, Brown), and "Henry Bobbity Is Missing And It Is All Billy Bobbity's Fault," (Crane Hill Publishers, 1996).

He wrote the screenplay of the Columbia Pictures film "Crazy in Alabama," directed by Antonio Banderas, and starring Melanie Griffith, an official selection of the Venice and San Sebastian film festivals in 1999.

Childress is now working on his eighth novel and a film project. He lives in Key West, Florida.

(Author photo by Brett Hall)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Childress is SO misunderstood by his critics, September 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: World Made of Fire (Paperback)

I can't believe that the reviewer below so totally missed the point of "A World Made of Fire." It's rather silly to criticize an allegory for being allegorical .... and to complain of the use of "Creole" and "Cajun" dialects in a novel very clearly set in Alabama shows us where he or she is coming from.

My advice to Childress fans: check out this remarkable first novel. It contains the seeds of nearly all his themes: tragedy, family, religion, and the supernatural. A wonderful book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Loved this one!, November 10, 2008

By 

S. Suire (Baton Rouge, LA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A World Made of Fire (Paperback)

Well, I was warned that this one would not be as comedic as other Mark Childress novels, but I still found myself giggling quite often. You can not help but fall in love with Stella, who manages to always stay positive and keep family, however messed up it is, above all else. The relationship between Stella and Jacko (yes, weird old Uncle Jacko from One Mississippi!) was so touching and their discourse flat out cracked me up. I'm always ready to read more of Mark Childress, and this early novel of his was no let down!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Pleasing Southern Allegory, September 15, 2011

By 

Karen Allen - See all my reviews

This review is from: A World Made of Fire (Kindle Edition)

Overall: 4 1/2 stars

Plot/Storyline: 4 1/2 stars

A World Made of Fire is a well-constructed southern allegory. As such, it starts with small fragments that the reader has to slowly gather and connect and later to understand. Gradually, the pieces do add up and the story moves forward.

I was impressed by the way that the story moves both forward and backward at the same time. It progresses in a fairly linear fashion from 1909 to the beginnings of World War I as we witness the endless chain of tragedies that befall Callie and her children. At the same time, it is only as Stella tries to look back and understand her family, that these events become clear.

Near the beginning of the book, each incident seems brief and isolated, but events do build on each other in a way that makes sense and the resolution has the appropriate balance of resolution and uncertainty.

Characters: 5 stars

At first, I found it difficult to connect with the characters in A World Made of Fire. Callie was deliberately opaque, Stella was far too accepting, and the men were southern stereotypes (kindly doctor, half-crazy neighbor). It wasn't really until Little Brown Mary appeared that I began to appreciate the character development.

Once I started to see characters, particularly Stella and Jacko through the lens that Little Brown Mary provided, the subtleties started to shine through. Then, Jacko and Stella seemed to open up and their perceptions help to build the reader's view of the whole community.

In the end, I felt that A World Made of Fire was populated with human, flawed, interesting characters.

Writing Style: 4 stars

There is a lot of good writing in A World Made of Fire. Allegory is difficult to write and it tends to lend itself to a closer scrutiny of the use of language than other writing styles.

The narration is strong and lyrical. Phrases like, "She shook her head as if fate were a hairnet..." stick in the reader's mind in a pleasing way. The dialogue has a nice rhythm and the settings are vivid.

It is the use of imagery that did not entirely work for me. I felt that the images and uses of fire were a little heavy-handed and that the author could have trusted his readers a little bit more. I was also intrigued by all of the hound and dog imagery at the beginning of the book that didn't seem to add up to anything by the end. I kept wanting it to mean more than it did.

Overall, this is a rich, affecting book.