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Summary
Summary
Sweet Eyes is the wondrous story of the young woman Honey Parrish, who becomes involved in an interracial love affair and struggles to solve longstanding mysteries in her hometown and to move beyond her family's troubled past.
Author Notes
Jonis Agee is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author of several books, including Strange Angels , South of Resurrection , The Weight of Dreams , and Acts of Love on Indigo Road: New and Selected Stories.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Honey Parrish of Divinity, Iowa, drinks too much, sleeps around and talks to her dead lover. As Agee ( Bend This Heart ) describes her in this richly textured first novel, Honey is a woman drifting toward madness while searching for something that will anchor her to safety.The main cause of her wavering reason is Honey's dysfunctional WASP family, including an abusive father, a psychotic brother called Sonny Boy and a 300-pound sister oddly named Baby. Honey is also plagued by the voice of Clinton, her dead lover, until Jasper Johnson comes along. Johnson, the ``sweet eyes'' of the title, is the town's only black man. His tempestuous affair with Honey is the spark that fires a smoldering racism in the community, spearheaded by Sonny Boy. Fearing that her brother's bigotry caused the death of a young black woman 15 years earlier, Honey launches a painful search for the truth. When she learns the killer's identity, she begins to lose her mind. It is Jasper's love, awakening her self-respect, that saves Honey. Her sense of self-worth also helps her to mete out a kind of justice to the murderer. While Agee demonstrates that the roots of psychosis and violence often start within the family, she also makes a case for the family's importance--and for the necessity of self-esteem--writing with fearless precision and evocative detail. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A first novel from poet and short-story writer Agee (Bend This Heart, Pretend We've Never Met, both 1989)--about small-town life, spiced with Peyton Place intrigue and racism, in Divinity, Iowa--is filled with a great deal of mood music, but also effectively evokes its female narrator's coming-of-age. Honey Parrish, 33, is ""the unofficial UN observer to this war-tom country""; she's saddled with, or guided by (depending upon your point of view), the frequent visits of dead vet Clinton, who offers cagey advice but also seems to harbor a deadly secret--a secret that the thin plot here finally unravels: Clinton, before his death, accidentally shot a black woman in the head one night in the company of some other good old boys, Honey's evil brother Sonny Boy the most prominent among them. Agee's novel, on the way to revealing this information, alternates bursts of poetic prose with the saga of Honey's long, complicated affair with Jasper Johnson, the only black in town: ""I don't fit in. I don't even want to."" Sonny and some others beat up Jasper when he gets involved with Honey, and someone also begins to pelt Honey's trailer with beer cans: turns out to be Sonny Boy, of course. Meanwhile, several other vivid characters fill in the gaps: Honey's pregnant best friend, Twyla Tooley, who ""hears everything in town"" and dies on the way to the hospital; Honey's sexist boss Bowker, who oversees a centennial for Divinity and eventually gets his comeuppance; and Azium Boardman, a geologist who is a sort of father-figure to Honey and literary consciousness to Agee (Boardman likes to figure out ""what the writer didn't have in mind, but ended up saying anyway""). While Agee often enough finds her rhythm, there are also frequent lapses into pointless gossip and soapy sentimentality. Still, there's enough sprawling vivacity here to let Agee do for Divinity, Iowa, what McMurtry does for Texasville: create a comfortable, lived-in world. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Honey, the bitchy, intelligent heroine of this first novel, tells us about her drinking, her crazy family, and her loves past and present. The one with "sweet eyes" is Jass, the only black man in Divinity, the small Iowa town where Honey lives. Almost too good to be true, he is the tonic to soothe her as she solves long-standing mysteries and resolves her own past. As Honey seeks and finds enlightenment, the compassion and understanding that follow help to mellow her view of the townsfolk. Agee's prose and her protagonist's astute observations give us a real sense of what is stifling and what is transcendent in rural America. ~--Anne Schmitt
Library Journal Review
Honey Parrish lives in the small town of Divinity, Iowa, which is populated with a gallery of characters who could have walked out of a Eudora Welty novel. When Honey has an affair with Jasper Johnson, a black man, she provokes anger and resentment masking an unsolved murder that happened years before. Honey is thus pushed toward a discovery of the truth behind the mystery--a truth linked to her own fragile identity. The first-person narration lends immediacy to the novel and encourages the reader to identify with Honey. Agee has a fine ear for dialog, and the pacing of this novel is sure. It is also fun to read, with prose as clean as the edge of a new spade. Sweet Eyes credibly seeks out particular qualities and flaws in human nature and reveals human dilemmas common to all. Fans of Bobbie Ann Mason will especially appreciate this local-color novel.-- Francis Poole, Univ. of Delaware, Newark (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
