Review by Booklist Review
Price's latest novel is the story of a woman's life, told in her own precise and feisty voice. Roxanna Slade has not led what would be considered an outwardly distinguished life, a life she clearly recalls now in her 90s. Certainly not in her dotage, for she is still as alert as ever, Roxanna recounts the contents of her long decades on earth; she took some pretty hard knocks, but her true grit served her well. Her boyfriend died right before her very eyes; then she married his brother--but not before suffering a nervous breakdown. The discovery of the existence of her husband's mistress shadowed the rest of her long life, but life went on nonetheless; her children grew up, and she adjusted to changing times. In mentioning how most days are just like other days in the general picture of people's lives, Roxanna says, "Most things that happen to a person leave no more trace than last month's rain drop." That assertion notwithstanding, the depression she succumbed to after becoming a mother was still a watershed period in her life. Ultimately, though, Does she harbor regrets? Has she let blame fester? Not at all, for Roxanna has great respect for the life she has led. And the reader once more comes away from a Price novel with great respect for his ability to fashion full and credible characters and tell their quietly heroic stories with the greatest of empathy. Sure to be asked for and appreciated by serious fiction readers. --Brad Hooper
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Many of the virtues that have endeared Price (Kate Vaiden) to readers are present in this story of a North Carolina woman and several generations of her family. Price's musically cadenced, nostalgia-washed prose, plangent with portent and loss and vibrant with imagery, is as beguiling as ever. His picture of life in the South a century ago is imbued with candor about customs and attitudesespecially those concerning women and race. Equally evident is his tendency to construct improbably melodramatic events, a propensity that almost throws the novel off course. In the space of three hours on her 20th birthday in 1920, Roxanna Dane meets Larkin Slade, accepts his proposal of marriage and watches him drown. Even in the few pages it takes to recount these events, Price so thickly foreshadows tragedy that one grows impatient. Most of what happens to Roxanna for the first half of the book is strictly interior, a mystical soul-searching that has little to do with outside events: "I almost think the main part of my life has passed in my mind, hid even from me," she muses. Yet Price excels in documenting the remainder of Roxanna's life with sensitive attention to emotional detail, especially in his well-grounded descriptions of her debilitating clinical depression. And after Roxanna marries Larkin's brother Palmer, bears his children and learns about his infidelity, the second half of the novel perks up with some old-fashioned soap-opera juicethanks mainly to the horrendous legacy of slavery and its repercussions. The same voice that was overwrought when trying to describe a young girl's awakening becomes more interestingly idiosyncratic when looking at the New South, which Roxanna lives to experience and describe. (May) FYI: Price's earlier novels, Kate Vaiden and Clear Pictures, are being reissued to coincide with this novel's publication. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A lovingly detailed record of a long and seemingly modest life, given resonance by the prolific Price's extraordinary language and his sharp eye for the subtle complexities of character (The Promise of Rest, 1995, etc.). Roxana Slade, born with the century, looks back from the near present over her long and (seemingly) uneventful life as a wife and mother in a small North Carolina town. While seeming to focus on the ups and downs of her marriage to the decent, somewhat stolid Palmer, and the lives of her son and daughter, she also creates a rich portrait of a community dragged reluctantly out of its venerable agricultural existence into the raucous modern world. She begins by loving Palmer's younger brother, the handsome, flamboyant Larkin, until, in one of the tragedies that inevitably touch most lives, he dies in an accident. It's only later that the quiet Palmer comes to her attention. Using a first-person narrative plays to Price's strengths: Roxana's language is frank, seemingly unadorned, but subtly colored both by a tart regional flavor and by a nicely idiosyncratic rhythm and pace. And her detailed portrait of an extended southern family over time reminds us of Price's fascination with the decisive impact of the family, for good or ill, on individuals. There are appropriately dark scenes as well: Roxana, sinking into a bitter depression, briefly assaults her own daughter. And Palmer, though he is a devout and kindhearted figure, strikes his oldest friend in a fit of anger, blinding him in one eye. What emerges from Roxana's unblinking recollections is a portrait of an affectionate woman who has learned to master her own anger, come to grips with her regrets, and who has drawn from the incidents of her life a hard-earned wisdom. Roxana is a memorable figure, and further indication of Price's quiet, precise power as a novelist. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
