Synopsis
Marietta Cook is different from the other Gullah-speaking women among whom she lives. Choosing isolation, she focuses on raising her twin sons. The success her sons have on the football field finally releases Marietta from her self-imposed separation from the world.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1993-07-01 | | Edition Description: | Reprint |
| Size | | Length: | 355 pages | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 12.0 oz |
Publisher's Note
A rich, passionate first novel featuring a strong and determined African American woman living in contemporary South Carolina. "Straight's portrayal . . . is nearly miraculous in its astonishing richness of detail . . . emotional honesty and . . . human thought and feeling".--"USA Today".
Unusually big and extremely dark--the blue-black of her African ancestors--Marietta Cook differs from the traditional women of her exotic birthplace of Pine Gardens in the Gullah-speaking Low Country of South Carolina. Always protecting herself through deliberate isolation, Marietta chooses to leave Pine Gardens for Charleston after her mother's death, only to return a short time later pregnant with twin sons. Her sons become the center of her life, the source and the focus of her strength, and the reason for her increased distance from the rest of the world. Marietta encourages them to play football because she sees the football field as one of the few places where blacks and whites can compete as equals. Only after her sons' successes on the football field can Marietta finally concentrate on finding her own place in the world.
Industry Reviews
"[Her] prose is lively and elegant...[Her way] with her characters and their sundry environments is deft and assured."
New York Times Book Review - Leon Rooke (08/16/1992)
"...Her fiction rings with the kind of truth that only a sensitive ear, a retentive memory, and a clear eye can provide, a true disciple of Henry James's dictum that a writer is someone on whom nothing is ever lost."
Doris Grumbach
"...A remarkable writer--there is no new, emerging voice of the past decade more surprising, and more richly and subtly human than she...."
Joyce Carol Oates
"This is not just the kind of fiction we like; it is the kind of fiction that we need."
David Bradley
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