Knee-Deep in Wonder
A Novel
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A dazzling first novel about four generations of fear and longing in the deep South
"Who're your people, girl?" It's the song of the South, the big question, persistent and unforgiving. Helene Strickland, daughter of Lafayette County, Arkansas, and lately of the Northeast, doesn't have an answer. Instead, she has memories riddled with half-truths, stories heard in fits and starts, a family history from a family that doesn't know its own past.
In the steamy August of 1976, Helene returns home for her aunt's funeral determined to learn the truth, but her probing yields more questions than answers: Why did her grandmother, Liberty, a cotton picker turned saloon owner, have no name until she was fourteen? Why does Queen Ester, Helene's mother, dress like a child, talk to no one, and refuse to see her own daughter? And who was Chess, a man with a terror of water, a man like a honey trap who drew the women and then destroyed them?
In a mesmerizing narrative, April Reynolds seamlessly weaves past and present, intricate flashbacks and interlaced stories to produce an epic novel of one family maimed by the deepest wounds of history. Rich with legend, poetry, and historic events, Knee-Deep in Wonder captures the complex humanity of black Southern life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Children grow crooked when they live in a house that's unnatural," Queen Ester tells her grown, estranged daughter, Helene Strickland. Three generations of crooked children grow into complex women in Reynolds's debut novel, a winding journey through black Southern culture and history as viewed through the warped lens of one family's struggles. Queen Ester's mother, Liberty, is abandoned as a girl and grows up picking cotton on tenant farms. In 1930, she starts a cafe in Lafayette County, Ark., and takes in a charming drifter, neglecting her daughter, Queen Ester, who becomes strange and reclusive. Queen Ester, in turn, is forced to give up her own daughter, Helene, born out of wedlock. In 1976, Helene, who now works at a nursing home in Washington, D.C., comes back to Lafayette County for a funeral and to seek answers about her past. But the crafty, childlike Queen Ester instead feeds her lies and half-truths, circling around the family's story, but never quite reaching its sordid center. The large cast of characters navigate myth and history, including the indignities of the sharecropper system and a disastrous 1927 flood in Mississippi. Through flashbacks and hinted connections, the family's secrets are gradually revealed. Though the tangled, self-consciously Faulknerian narration occasionally leaves the reader as lost as Helene, and last-minute attempts to tie together loose ends feel hasty and cosmetic, Reynolds's talent for fluent, colloquial dialogue provides relief. It is the characters themselves who hold the readers' attention in the end, as they simultaneously cling to and wound one another. Author tour.
Customer Reviews
Okay
This book was hard to get into. The characters didn’t flow at first but once I got into it i generally liked the rest of the book. Some of the writing was very deep and other parts were choppy.