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Searching... Bayport Public Library | FICTION GRAU | Searching... Unknown |
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Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Two narratives uneasily coexist in this latest novel by Grau, one absorbing and potentially riveting, the other curiously dry and flat. The book's first half is as powerful as anything this talented writer ( Nine Women ) has ever produced. Her rhythmic prose accommodates precise yet incandescent descriptions of the natural world, and she evokes the patterns of daily farm life. Abandoned by their parents during the Depression, six young black children become homeless ``roadwalkers'' in the South. Eventually only Baby and her older brother Joseph remain, desperately foraging and stealing in order to survive. Possessed by inchoate anger, Joseph sets fires on a restored plantation; he escapes from a hunting party, but Baby is caught and sent to an orphanage by the farm's kind owner. There the feral child is named Mary Woods and treated with compassion, until she turns her back on those who succored her. Grau interweaves Baby's story with that of the plantation's white manager, Charles Wilson, drawing a moving comparison. Charles, too, loses his mother at a young age, but he has the safety net of family to sustain him. To this point, the narrative is luminous and involving, although Grau does spell out the spiritual bonds between her characters with some heavy-handedness, proclaiming empathies that are facile and devised. But when, in the book's second half, Mary's daughter, Nanda, becomes the protagonist, the narrative loses its way. Nanda's experiences at boarding school, where she is a pariah in a white world, are meant to explain her bitterness, fury and self-centeredness. But though Grau means to demonstrate how survivors suffer, learn and endure, Nanda and her mother are opaque and charmless; neither has a soul. One wishes that Grau had continued the path on which the first half of the book is so firmly placed. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Polished prose almost disguises and makes up for the surprising emotional distance in this novel of two generations. Grau (Nine Women, 1985, etc.) is a great stylist, and in relating the story of Baby, an African-American child first seen wandering the roads of the American South with two siblings in 1934, and then that of her daughter Nanda, she has complete control over language. Perhaps it is Baby's numbingly sad existence that moves the action one notch away from the reader. Abandoned by an aunt on the way to Atlanta and then left by their sister as well, Baby and her brother, Joseph, tramp along until a farmer finds them and gets into a knife fight with Joseph. Baby is delivered to a convent in a sack and wearing a harness. A young novice-to-be named Rita teaches the girl the ways of civilization--including toilet- training--and names her Mary Woods, after the virgin mother and the place the farmer found her. When Mary is informed that she will be sent to work as a servant, she runs away. The second half of the book is devoted to her daughter, the offspring of a salesman from India, who grows up in an only slightly more conventional environment believing that she is a princess. Grau's images are quietly startling, but she has a tendency to give too much background about minor characters. The man who discovers Baby and her brother in the woods is the subject of a complete genealogy, and Rita's route to the convent is explicated at greater than necessary length. Even during these superfluous passages, however, the text flows easily. A distinct and enjoyable voice that sometimes loses its way.
Booklist Review
Grau made her name with her 1964 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Keepers of the House and has been in the foreground of southern fiction ever since. Her latest novel divides evenly into two halves, telling the two distinct parts of the life of Mary Woods. Mary was a child of the Depression, one of many parentless black children roaming the wrung-out southern landscape stealing and begging and eating scraps--"roadwalkers." Mary is captured as if she were some feral creature and turned over to an orphanage, where slowly, ever so slowly, she comes out of her totally withdrawn state. The story is then picked up years later by Mary's daughter, and we see Mary has made an incredible success of herself as a dressmaker, and her daughter has become the first black to enter a private girls' school. Mary's dressmaking enterprise continues to flourish, and the advantages wrought by her success allow the daughter to marry well and have a fine home and all the security that Mary couldn't have imagined as a little roadwalker years back. This coming-full-circle novel is elevating and well-spoken, and should be promoted to all readers of serious fiction. ~--Brad Hooper
Library Journal Review
In her first novel in 18 years, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Grau incorporates the story ``The Beginning'' from Nine Women (LJ 1/86), moving far beyond her original concept. Grau relates the experiences of Baby, a homeless African American child during the Depression, whose seemingly endless travels eventually bring her success and respectability, and Nanda, Baby's daughter, whose magical relationship with her mother gives her the strength to integrate an exclusive convent school. This is quintessential Grau: the vivid descriptions of the South, the multiple perspectives, the unblinking lack of sentimentality, and the strong female characters, whose amazing inner strength allows them to rise above the most dreadful and degrading experiences, turning them into victories. The first half of the book, chronicling Baby's experiences wandering the back roads of the South, is particularly moving, while the second half-which tells Nanda's story-is less compelling. Nonetheless, Grau's many admirers will be delighted at long last to have a new work by one of the novel's finest practitioners.-Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, Kan. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
