It’s hard to go wrong giving Mom a book, but it’s not impossible. Let me help you avoid one high risk gift! You’ve likely noticed Frog Music, by Emma Donoghue, one of the big spring reads prominently featured at your local bookstore, at Amazon, and even at Kroger. For a book with a mostly happy ending, it will really bring you (or her) down. It also includes some rather disturbing sex scenes. Not that Mom can’t handle it. But is it what she wants to be reading? Don’t be taken in by the aggressive marketing of this book; it is not for everyone.
Amy Greene’s Long Man is truly the opposite, and not because it is saccharine or predictable. I would give it to my mother, my father, my sister, or my friend – and in fact (spoiler alert, Mom and Nana Mary!) I will be giving it to my mother and mother-in-law on May 11th. For a book with some very sad moments, it will fundamentally lift you up.
Darkness does not overwhelm Amy Greene’s Long Man, though this novel is also set in hard times. In 1936, the Tennessee Valley Authority dammed the “Long Man” River, flooding the hardscrabble community of Yuneetah in order to bring electricity and progress to an impoverished
At one point, Annie Clyde confronts the old healer and midwife, Beulah, who raised Amos as her own after he was abandoned as a small boy. Amos left Yuneetah for parts unknown as a young man but always returned periodically, always bringing trouble. Annie Clyde goes to Beulah’s house with a gun:
At long last Beulah opened up with a broom in her hands. She looked as tired as Annie Clyde felt. Her puckered face browned with age, the folds of her neck grimed it seemed with years of soil, wearing a shawl over her checkered dress in spite of the season. As soon as Annie Clyde saw her time seemed to stop and the words tumbled out. “I know you lied.”
Beulah studied Annie Clyde, her rheumy eyes gleaming out of wrinkled pits. “I didn’t know where he was, though,” the old woman said. “That was the truth. And he ain’t here now.”
“But you know where he could be.”
“If I did, I wouldn’t tell it. Look at you. You might shoot him.”
“I’d shoot anybody over Gracie.”
“Well. I’d take a bullet over Amos.”
Beulah pressed her mouth into a line, her chin jutting. The sun came out some. Annie Clyde felt the light on her back. “He’s my son,” Beulah said, as if that was explanation enough.
Long Man conveys hope, not despair, in spite of a multitude of sorrows. There is hope in the beauty of the land; in the ties that have bound the generations who have lived and loved and suffered together; in the lushness of Amy Greene’s prose; and most of all, in the fierceness of maternal love.
Looking forward to my copy of Long Man! This whetted my appetite for more! Mom
I’m so glad that you’ll be here soon for me to give it to you! Love, Jen