The Arms of God
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Alice is making her daughter dinner when her mother Olivia, who left her at a day care center when she was four-years-old, appears at her door. Although Alice has managed to navigate an unforgiving foster care system to build a good life for herself, she has never really recovered from her mother's disappearance. Olivia's sudden reappearance is like a quiet, unexplained gift. Over the next couple of weeks Alice asks Olivia to dinner. Olivia is always dropped off by a friend and sits peacefully as Alice and her daughter talk over the meal. One afternoon Alice gets a call from the hospital telling her that Olivia is dead. The only identification the hospital could find was Alice's number with the word "daughter" written underneath it. She goes to pick up Olivia's things and finds the key to her apartment. It is here that the mystery of Olivia's past is slowly uncovered and Alice begins to understand how the power of hatred can hold a woman down and how the power of friendship can lift her up again.
Not since her bestselling book The Friendship Cake has Hinton created characters who are so filled with heartache and fragile hope, that they will become a permanent part of the reader's life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An assured if overly emotive storyteller, Hinton (Friendship Cake) spins the tragic tale of Olivia Jacobs, beginning with Olivia's unexplained appearance at the North Carolina home of her grown daughter, Alice, whom she abandoned decades earlier at a day-care center. When elderly Olivia dies just three weeks after suddenly reentering her daughter's life, Alice, raised in a series of foster homes but now the single mother of a 10-year-old daughter, is left to unlock the mystery of her mother's life from a scrapbook of clues. The bulk of the novel chronicles Olivia's Depression-era childhood and adolescence in rural Smoketown, N.C., the uneasy fringe between two enclaves one black, one white where racial tension, violence and fear intrude like choke weed. Olivia's marginalized and impoverished white family including her neglectful single mother, Mattie, and older brother, Roy is treated kindly by their African-American neighbors. Olivia and Tree, the girl next door, bridge the racial divide with friendship, but violence and misunderstanding shatter their lives. Olivia's story affords Alice a deeper understanding of both her errant mother and herself. Addressing love, faith, friendship and race, Hinton delivers an overwrought but satisfying apologia for Olivia.
