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Tag: North America

Tumbling, by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

Tumbling, by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

Diane McKinney-Whetstone is the acclaimed author of six novels, the first of which is Tumbling, first published in 1996. The story, which takes place in Philadelphia in the 1940s and 1950s, focuses on Noon, her husband Herbie, and their two adopted children. But their lives are so intertwined with other community members that the novel is really about the entire neighborhood of African-Americans. There are so many things I like about this novel, from the engaging story lines to the…

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The Boston Girl, by Anita Diamant

The Boston Girl, by Anita Diamant

Told as a series of anecdotes from a Jewish grandmother, Addie Baum, to her granddaughter Ava, The Boston Girl is a coming-of-age story set in the early 1900s. Addie’s parents have fled an unnamed country in Europe, and Addie is the first child born in the United States. Her father and sister work in a sweatshop, and the family lives in a tenement. Addie’s parents expect her to leave school after 8th grade and start working. Central to the story…

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The Widows, by Jess Montgomery

The Widows, by Jess Montgomery

I was looking forward to reading The Widows because it takes place in Ohio (my home state) and it involves Appalachian culture (which I’m interested in). And once I started to read it, I couldn’t put it down. One of the main characters in The Widows, Lily Ross, was inspired by the first female sheriff in Ohio (Maude Collins, pictured above, from the Vinton County web site). When Lily’s husband, the sheriff, is murdered in chapter 1, she is asked…

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Sapphira and the Slave Girl, by Willa Cather

Sapphira and the Slave Girl, by Willa Cather

Sapphira and the Slave Girl is Willa Cather’s last novel, published in 1940. It takes place in 1856 in Back Creek, Virginia. Cather was born in Back Creek in 1873 and lived there for nine years, before moving with her family to Nebraska (the setting of some of her more famous books, such as My Antonia). Sapphira and the Slave Girl was inspired by stories that Cather heard in her childhood. When Sapphira Colbert married and moved from Winchester to…

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Wench, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Wench, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Wench tells of four women slaves who travel with their masters each summer to Tawawa House, a resort in Ohio, a free state. For the women, it is a working vacation, where they have enough leisure to swim in the hot springs and take occasional short trips. Yet even as they are dressed prettily for a special dinner-dance with their masters, they cannot forget that they are slaves, each compelled to share her master’s bed and bear his children. The…

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Snow Child graphic from Georgia Stitt's web site
The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey

The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey

The Snow Child is inspired by the Russian folk tale of an elderly couple who, unable to have children, used snow to form a girl who then comes to life. This novel takes place in 1920s Alaska instead of Russia, and the “elderly” couple, Mabel and Jack, are about fifty years old. Ten years have passed since Mabel gave birth to a still-born child in Pennsylvania, and her grief, and the loneliness she feels at family gatherings full of children,…

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Cane River, by Lalita Tademy

Cane River, by Lalita Tademy

The novel Cane River is so closely based on Lalita Tademy’s ancestors that she includes family photographs, documents, and newspaper clippings. In 1995, Tademy quit her job as a vice president of Sun Microsystems so she could research her family’s history and write a novel. Cane River was published in 2001. Tademy starts her novel with the story of a woman seven generations removed from herself: Elisabeth, a slave in the early 1800’s on a plantation along Cane River in…

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The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

First published in 1982, The Color Purple turns 35 this year (2017). The novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and was made into an award-winning movie in 1985. The photo above is from the cover of her biography, Alice Walker: A Life. The time and place of this novel are obscure at first, because the narrator is an uneducated young woman who doesn’t supply this information. The details of her life give us clues: this…

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The Tall Woman, by Wilma Dykeman

The Tall Woman, by Wilma Dykeman

The Tall Woman, first published in 1962, is a classic of Appalachian literature. At the time of her birth, author Wilma Dykeman’s family had resided in the mountains of North Carolina for generations, and the novel takes place in these mountains during and after the Civil War. The novel follows the main character, Lydia, from young womanhood to death. Shortly after their marriage her husband, Mark, decides to join the war effort on the Union side, while her father and…

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Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, was inspired by the story of escaped slave Margaret Garner, who killed her own child when she and her family were about to be recaptured by slave-hunters. In an interview in the New York Times, Morrison says that while she became fascinated by Garner’s story, she also wanted to be free to create the character herself. ”Now I didn’t do any more research at all about that story. I…

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