Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley
Novellas and Stories
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Ann Pancake's 2007 novel Strange As This Weather Has Been exposed the devastating fallout of mountaintop removal mining on a single West Virginia family. In Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, a follow–up collection of eleven astonishing novellas and short stories, Pancake again features characters who are intensely connected to their land––sometimes through love, sometimes through hate––and who experience brokenness and loss, redemption and revelation, often through their relationships to places under siege. Retired strip miners find themselves victimized by the industry that supported them; a family breaks down along generation lines over a fracking lease; children transcend addict parents and adult suicide; an urban woman must confront her skepticism about worlds behind this one when she finds bones through a mysterious force she can't name. Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley explores poverty, class, environmental breakdown and social collapse while also affirming the world's sacredness.
Ann Pancake's ear for the Appalachian dialect is both pitch–perfect and respectful, that of one who writes from the heart of this world. Her firsthand knowledge of her rural place and her exquisite depictions of the intricacies of families may remind one of Alice Munro.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This gritty, stylish assembly of two novellas and nine short stories from West Virginia author Pancake (Strange as This Weather Has Been) is set in her native state. The first novella, In Such Light, the most accomplished of the offerings, is a complex coming-of-age tale about Janie Lambert, an insecure college student in danger of flunking out, who spends her summer with her grandparents. She befriends her disabled Uncle Bobby while she dates his neighbor Nate Simmons, recently broken up with his girlfriend, Melissa. When not working at the local cinema's concession stand, Janie takes wild motorcycle jaunts with Nate. Meanwhile, Nate grows insanely jealous of Melissa's new boyfriend and Janie has to decide whether to continue their relationship. The second novella, Sugar's Up, is a more lighthearted narrative about Calvin Bergdoll, a retired social worker and hyperactive diabetic (hence the title), who can barely cope with his hometown of Berker, W.Va., during the pandemonium of celebrating their Bygone Days, which includes a raucous Civil War reenactment. The painful, touching title short story is about a three-year-old boy, Matthew Halliday ("Mish" for short), who visits his sick and unemployed dad for Christmas and the father's struggle to care for his son. Mish associates their listening to the music of Bob Marley with the better times father and son spent together, an ultimate ray of hope and optimism in Pancake's well-crafted collection.
