One of the best debut novels I have read in a long time, Falling to Earth focuses on the aftermath of the largest and most powerful tornado ever to hit the United States, one known as the Tri-State Tornado of March 18, 1925, which traveled two hundred nineteen miles through northeast Missouri, across southern Illinois, and into southwest Indiana over the course of three hours eighteen minutes. Destroying everything in its path, it killed almost seven hundred people. Author Kate Southwood describes the aftermath of this storm in the town of Marah, Illinois, a rural composite of all the communities hit by this horrific storm. What elevates this novel above a journalistic report of buildings destroyed and communities devastated is Southwood’s focus on the effects of the tornado on one family – not the inspiring survival story of a family that has lost everything, as one might expect, but the story of a family that has lost nothing, their children safe, their home intact, and their lumber business safe. The novel’s fast pace, a direct result of the author’s ability to present details with which the reader will identify, combined with her careful building of the resentment against the Graves family, make this a novel which few will forget.
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Simon Howe, editor of the weekly newspaper in rural Maine, has just hired a new employee, previously an employee of a Portland newspaper and a former farm team player for the Red Sox, now an ex-con who served six years for assault on a woman. Amy, Simon’s wife, takes the side of the woman victim, wondering aloud if the victim, too, has a new job, and if she’s gotten over the trauma of being sexually assaulted. The new employee has told Simon that there are two sides for everything, but Amy feels such crimes are too damaging to women to be forgiven and she does not want to meet him. Soon after, Simon receives the first of what will eventually number six postcards from around the country, none of them signed, gradually hinting at some terrible deed that Simon unknowingly committed in the past. As the cards are mailed from closer and closer destinations, first from the Great Salt Lake, and then from Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Portland, Simon and Amy become more stressed and more impatient with each other. The final card is hand-delivered to the family’s mailbox, and the message demands that Simon meet with the sender during his 25th reunion celebration. Author George Harrar ratchets up the tension to the breaking point, and few readers will be able to resist seeing this book as a classic Alfred Hitchcock film. Ironies abound here in this tension-filled study of universal themes as seen through the seemingly simple life of a respected man in Red Paint Bay.
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From the explosion of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, to the killings of prisoners by the Cubans and Spanish in the aftermath of the Protocol of Peace on August 12, 1898, American news correspondent Sam Carleton records his day-by-day actions during the Spanish-American War. Sam Carleton is only “six weeks into his twenty-seventh year” when he arrives in Cuba, a five-foot six-inch, one hundred-twenty pound man with a bad cough, who feels that “his literary future is behind him.” The author of a book about the Civil War published in 1895, Carleton, a pseudonym for author Stephen Crane, had abandoned the idea of war as an epic, full of heroes making courageous decisions and willingly sacrificing their lives for a cause. Instead, he focused on the specific – the small, personal aspects of daily life among ordinary Union soldiers – describing how the soldiers feel, what they are thinking, and even, in some cases, their fear. Time moves back and forth, in and out of the past, and in and out of Carleton’s imagination as his story of the Spanish-American war takes place. Another story evolves in parallel with the story of Sam Carleton. Appearing and reappearing without warning throughout this novel, George Fleming, son of Henry Fleming from The Red Badge of Courage, accompanied by Esther Slone, travels to a collapsed mine in western Pennsylvania to help rescue sixty trapped miners. Filled with facts about the life of Stephen Crane, all of which are included in footnotes at the end of the book, the novel creates a powerful picture of Crane’s life.
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Mixing the supernatural with dramatic and horrifying realism, this generational novel contains all the ingredients necessary to become a huge popular success. Spanning the years between the 1920s and the present, author Bernice L. McFadden focuses on three generations of the Hilson family as they interact with each other, with others in their segregated neighborhood, and with the white world beyond. Using the town of Money, Mississippi, itself as the “narrator,” the author creates lively scenes involving Reverend August Hilson, new pastor of the only black church, and his family, who have escaped the violence of Tulsa to settle in this small town near Greenwood, Mississippi, along the Tallahatchee River. Moving from the 1920s to the present, with considerable time spent on the torture-murder of Emmett Till in 1955, Bernice McFadden focuses on the everyday lives of all her characters, both black and white, as they navigate the thorny paths of racial prejudice within a small community.
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William Kennedy’s latest novel in the Albany Cycle, his eighth, continues the story of several repeating families from Albany, New York, during the heyday of its infamous, politically corrupt “machine.” Focusing on Daniel Quinn, a newspaper reporter who is the grandson of the Daniel Quinn (who reported on the Civil War in Quinn’s Book), this novel begins in August, 1936, when Daniel is a child, watching as his father brings a piano (origins unknown) into the Mayor’s house. Cody Mason, a pianist specializing in Harlem “stride,” is about to put on a private show with the young Bing Crosby. Only six pages (and twenty-one years) later, Quinn, an experienced reporter, is in Havana in March, 1957, hanging out at the El Floridita bar and hoping that Ernest Hemingway, will show up. He also hopes to interview Fidel Castro. These two opening scenes, the arrival of Hemingway and his boorish attack on a tourist, and Quinn’s trip to Oriente province, establish the narrative tone and atmosphere for this novel which focuses on two revolutions, the Castro-led revolution in Cuba and the slightly later revolution in the US in the 1960s regarding civil rights. Humor and irony add considerable charm to the novel, and for many readers will more than outweigh the sometimes wooden characters and wandering narrative.
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