Last edited Mon Jan 8, 2024, 08:21 AM - Edit history (1)
reading Paulette Jiles's book, Chenneville and cannot recommend it highly enough. It is right up there with True Grit and the Lonesome Dove books. I loved it so much that I was tempted to go back and read it all over again, but thought maybe I should give it a rest. I still think about it often--Chenneville is a character to fall in love with.
I found that a book I had read back in the early 70s is now available on Kindle and for only $2.99, so I started on it last night. It is every bit as good as it was in 1973(?) and a great coming-of-age tale by Jeff Fields, A Cry of Angels.
It is the mid-1950s in Quarrytown, Georgia. In the slum known as the Ape Yard, hope’s last refuge is a boardinghouse where a handful of residents dream of a better life. Earl Whitaker, who is white, and Tio Grant, who is black, are both teenagers, both orphans, and best friends. In the same house live two of the most important adults in the boys’ lives: Em Jojohn, the gigantic Lumbee Indian handyman, is notorious for his binges, his rat-catching prowess, and his mysterious departures from town. Jayell Crooms, a gifted but rebellious architect, is stuck in a loveless marriage to a conventional woman intent on climbing the social ladder.
Crooms’s vision of a new Ape Yard, rebuilt by its own residents, unites the four—and puts them on a collision course with a small-town Machiavelli who rules the community like a feudal lord. Jeff Fields’s exuberantly defined characters and his firmly rooted sense of place have earned A Cry of Angels an intensely loyal following. Its republication, more than three decades since it first appeared, is cause for celebration.
EDITED TO ADD: I notice that the price on amazon is now at $19.99??? Maybe I just had an unused credit that they applied to the cost or maybe they charge different prices depending on who is buying. I don't know.
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