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Little Jordan
A young child is found dead on the banks of the Little Jordan river. Someone tries to commit suicide. A teenager runs away from home. Told from the perspective of 13-year-old Meg, the town's odd happenings become mysterious and magical. Against the sultry backdrop of a Southern summer, Meg's strange childhood world is eaten away by the caprice of adult relationships, and by the unpredictable tragedies that hang in the valley where she lives.
- GenresFictionComing Of Age
105 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 1995
1 person is currently reading
42 people want to read
About the author
Marly Youmans
37 books120 followers"Youmans (pronounced like 'yeoman' with an 's' added) is the best-kept secret among contemporary American writers." --John Wilson, editor, Books and Culture
MAZE OF BLOOD (Mercer University Press, 2015.) Novel. Inspired by the life of Robert E. Howard. Profusely decorated by artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Literary / fantastic. "...A haunting tale of dark obsessions and transcendent creative fire, rendered brilliantly in Youmans' richly poetic prose." --Midori Snyder
GLIMMERGLASS (Mercer University Press, 2014) IndieFab BOTYA Finalist. Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Novel. "It’s brilliantly well-written, shockingly raw, and transportingly—sometimes confusingly (but not in a bad way)—weird. Glimmerglass shimmers on the boundaries of the real and the unreal, of poetry and prose, of the ordinary and the fantastic. It’s down to the caprice of the individual reader, therefore, to decide exactly what sort of story it’s trying to tell. It’s difficult to overstate the emotional effect that Glimmerglass has had on me. This is a beautiful, complex, moving book. Marly Youmans’s prose flows like clear water, and every image is, as Cynthia observes, “full of meaning” (p. 39)." -Tom Atherton, "Strange Horizons"
A DEATH AT THE WHITE CAMELLIA ORPHANAGE (Mercer University Press, 2012) The Ferrol Sams Award for 2012; Silver Award in fiction, The ForeWord BOTYA Awards. Novel. "It is seldom that a novel from a small university press can compete with the offerings from the big houses in New York. A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage may be the best novel this reviewer has read this year. Its quality and story-telling remind one of The Adventures of Roderick Random, Great Expectation and The Grapes of Wrath among others. The winner of the 2012 "Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction," A Death has the potential to become a classic American picaresque novel. / One wishes, however, that this novel will not get shunted into the regional box and be seen only as a Southern novel. Its themes and the power of its language, the forceful flow of its storyline and its characters have earned the right to a broad national audience." 30 July 2012 ABOUT.COM Contemporary Literature, John M. Formy-Duval.
THALIAD (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2012.) Post-apocalyptic long poem combining elements of the novel and the epic. Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. In THALIAD, Marly Youmans has written a powerful and beautiful saga of seven children who escape a fiery apocalypse----though "written" is hardly the word to use, as this extraordinary account seems rather "channeled" or dreamed or imparted in a vision, told in heroic poetry of the highest calibre. Amazing, mesmerizing, filled with pithy wisdom, THALIAD is a work of genius which also seems particularly relevant to our own time. --novelist Lee Smith
THE FOLIATE HEAD (UK: Stanza Press, 2012.) Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Collection of formal poetry.
THE THRONE OF PSYCHE (Mercer University Press, 2011.) Collection of formal poetry. "Youmans is a writer of rare ability whose works will one day be studied by serious students of poetry." Greg Langley, Books editor, The Baton Rouge Advocate, October 2, 2011
VAL/ORSON (P. S. Publishing, 2009.) Novel. "Book of the Year" for 2009 Books and Culture Magazine
INGLEDOVE (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) Fantasy, y.a.
CLAIRE (Louisiana State University, 2003) Collection of poetry.
THE WOLF PIT (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.) The Michael Shaara Award. Short list, Southern Book Award.
CATHERWOOD (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.)
LITTLE JORDAN (David R. Godine, Publisher, 1995.)
MAZE OF BLOOD (Mercer University Press, 2015.) Novel. Inspired by the life of Robert E. Howard. Profusely decorated by artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Literary / fantastic. "...A haunting tale of dark obsessions and transcendent creative fire, rendered brilliantly in Youmans' richly poetic prose." --Midori Snyder
GLIMMERGLASS (Mercer University Press, 2014) IndieFab BOTYA Finalist. Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Novel. "It’s brilliantly well-written, shockingly raw, and transportingly—sometimes confusingly (but not in a bad way)—weird. Glimmerglass shimmers on the boundaries of the real and the unreal, of poetry and prose, of the ordinary and the fantastic. It’s down to the caprice of the individual reader, therefore, to decide exactly what sort of story it’s trying to tell. It’s difficult to overstate the emotional effect that Glimmerglass has had on me. This is a beautiful, complex, moving book. Marly Youmans’s prose flows like clear water, and every image is, as Cynthia observes, “full of meaning” (p. 39)." -Tom Atherton, "Strange Horizons"
A DEATH AT THE WHITE CAMELLIA ORPHANAGE (Mercer University Press, 2012) The Ferrol Sams Award for 2012; Silver Award in fiction, The ForeWord BOTYA Awards. Novel. "It is seldom that a novel from a small university press can compete with the offerings from the big houses in New York. A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage may be the best novel this reviewer has read this year. Its quality and story-telling remind one of The Adventures of Roderick Random, Great Expectation and The Grapes of Wrath among others. The winner of the 2012 "Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction," A Death has the potential to become a classic American picaresque novel. / One wishes, however, that this novel will not get shunted into the regional box and be seen only as a Southern novel. Its themes and the power of its language, the forceful flow of its storyline and its characters have earned the right to a broad national audience." 30 July 2012 ABOUT.COM Contemporary Literature, John M. Formy-Duval.
THALIAD (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2012.) Post-apocalyptic long poem combining elements of the novel and the epic. Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. In THALIAD, Marly Youmans has written a powerful and beautiful saga of seven children who escape a fiery apocalypse----though "written" is hardly the word to use, as this extraordinary account seems rather "channeled" or dreamed or imparted in a vision, told in heroic poetry of the highest calibre. Amazing, mesmerizing, filled with pithy wisdom, THALIAD is a work of genius which also seems particularly relevant to our own time. --novelist Lee Smith
THE FOLIATE HEAD (UK: Stanza Press, 2012.) Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Collection of formal poetry.
THE THRONE OF PSYCHE (Mercer University Press, 2011.) Collection of formal poetry. "Youmans is a writer of rare ability whose works will one day be studied by serious students of poetry." Greg Langley, Books editor, The Baton Rouge Advocate, October 2, 2011
VAL/ORSON (P. S. Publishing, 2009.) Novel. "Book of the Year" for 2009 Books and Culture Magazine
INGLEDOVE (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) Fantasy, y.a.
CLAIRE (Louisiana State University, 2003) Collection of poetry.
THE WOLF PIT (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.) The Michael Shaara Award. Short list, Southern Book Award.
CATHERWOOD (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.)
LITTLE JORDAN (David R. Godine, Publisher, 1995.)
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
April 25, 2016
This is quite a stunning little book. It's short, just over one hundred small-trim pages, but it's powerful. In some ways it's a classic coming-of-age story. But Youmans's poetic sensibilities come through in the clarity of the words and the occasionally striking expression. Meg touches death and life, and has to wrestle with what it all means, and whether God plays any part. Though it centers on a thirteen-year-old girl, this book reminds us that we're all coming of age and constantly struggling to touch and embrace life.
February 16, 2011
For my students, keep in mind that I wrote this for a slightly different assignment, but the basic idea is the same.
Amanda Lager
Dr. Powell
ENGL 429S: Southern Novelists
20 April 2010
Baptized on the Banks of the Little Jordan
Marly Youmans’s debut novel Little Jordan (David R. Godine, 1995) barely fills one hundred pages with the coming-of-age story of protagonist Meg. Youmans, who hails from the Chapel Hill region of North Carolina, captures the landscape of a small, Southern town during one lazy summer when Meg’s world seems to stretch into forever. As a thirteen-year-old girl, Meg is on the cusp of the promise of adulthood. That is until tragedy strikes her small town, which is nestled on the banks of the stream Little Jordan. She stumbles upon the drowned daughter of her neighbor Isadore. This episode begins a series of events for Meg that forever changes her. Youmans approaches the big questions in Meg’s life with beautiful prose and many reasons for the loss of Meg’s innocence, but Little Jordan is too short to offer a full resolution for the different threads of plot.
Little Jordan reads as an extended prose poem. A lengthy exercise in creating voice through language, Youmans uses imagery and iteration of the same few details to tie together each chapter. For example, flowers play a special role in this novel. Mysterious white flowers sail down Little Jordan, which remind Meg of the flowers at Isadore’s child’s funeral and of the natural Southern landscape. Speaking from Meg’s point of view, Youmans scatters deft brushstrokes of the landscape with which she is so familiar among her observations about the Southern people. Describing Fred Massey’s tent-pitching, Youmans switches back and forth between sentences of natural description and of flashback:
“The surface [of the lawn] was coarse and stubbly after the early cutting, and in our dry hot June the new growth hadn’t forced the fresh stems through the old yet. There was a good spot for camping down near the stream. Years back Fred Massey’s father had rolled a lawn for tennis—back when he and Mrs. Massey were newlyweds and lived in our house. I can’t imagine Mr. Massey playing tennis. The lawn is partly tangled with blackberry canes, but in the center the grass grows smooth and green.” (23)
Youmans buttresses her commentary on the characters with simple sentences about flora, allowing the pictures of nature to speak for themselves. The back-and-forth quality of this type of writing lends the narrative a lighter-than-air feel. Youmans’s training in poetry reads clearly in passages such as this one.
Isadore too is a work of art. The most tragic character Youmans creates, Isadore suffers from the loss of her child and nearly commits suicide in her grief. Meg comes to know Isadore after the incidents and sees a different version of femininity and motherhood than her own mother provides. Youmans describes Meg’s first meeting with her: “[Isadore] held her hands to her face, as if she were looking in them, as though her hands were a mirror. She wore a white sundress that swept below her knees. Bending toward the glowing tree, she was nothing so much as a moth feeding upon a flower” (4). Isadore seems to be a part of the landscape. Perhaps because of her emotions, she is as raw in spirit and as rough as an animal. Just as in the tent-pitching scene, Youmans ties the character to the land and to the plants and animals inhabiting it. Isadore is as Southern as moths and blackberries in summertime, and she is a creature in line with the tragic Southern tradition. Youmans taps quietly into the tradition and further paints adult themes into Meg’s life.
In drawing from the tragic South, Youmans goes another level deeper into the story, involving Meg’s relationships with the various members of her family. Her father is absent, having left Meg and her mother before the events of Little Jordan take place. Her mother is drawn to the wrong sorts of men and Meg feels threatened by the invasion of the newest suitor in her mother’s world. Also, later in the novel, Meg visits her aging grandparents and must confront another aspect of mortality: “I remember the feel of his thick hair bunched in my fists—coarse and clean-smelling as sea grass. In those days we would scream, jolt across the sand; when I was thirteen, we often stopped to rest” (83). Youmans approaches the scene with subtlety, letting the reader travel along with Meg’s observations about the passage of time and of age.
While all of these elements make for a beautiful piece of artwork, Little Jordan feels packed too tightly with drama. Because the novel is so short, Youmans cannot fully delve into the psychological and emotional effects that finding Isadore’s child and her first love—among many of her various encounters—may have on Meg. The iterations build upon one another as ripples in a pond, but the novel never dips beneath the surface to observe the currents motivating the characters. Meg must come to terms with a child’s death, Isadore’s suicide attempt, her attraction to Fred, her grandparents’ aging, and her parents’ dysfunction, yet she hardly reacts at all. That amount of baggage is enough for one person to unpack over an entire lifetime and one hundred pages is too short for a project to fully engage these topics in a meaningful way.
While Marly Youmans offers a breathtaking coming-of-age novel, Little Jordan comes up short where it should explore the various challenges in Meg’s life. The novel is striking. The beautiful imagery sucks the reader in and, for one hundred pages, the reader will not want to let go of this novel. After the end, however, more questions are begged than answered and the reader is torn from this fantastic world before ever fully delving into it.
Amanda Lager
Dr. Powell
ENGL 429S: Southern Novelists
20 April 2010
Baptized on the Banks of the Little Jordan
Marly Youmans’s debut novel Little Jordan (David R. Godine, 1995) barely fills one hundred pages with the coming-of-age story of protagonist Meg. Youmans, who hails from the Chapel Hill region of North Carolina, captures the landscape of a small, Southern town during one lazy summer when Meg’s world seems to stretch into forever. As a thirteen-year-old girl, Meg is on the cusp of the promise of adulthood. That is until tragedy strikes her small town, which is nestled on the banks of the stream Little Jordan. She stumbles upon the drowned daughter of her neighbor Isadore. This episode begins a series of events for Meg that forever changes her. Youmans approaches the big questions in Meg’s life with beautiful prose and many reasons for the loss of Meg’s innocence, but Little Jordan is too short to offer a full resolution for the different threads of plot.
Little Jordan reads as an extended prose poem. A lengthy exercise in creating voice through language, Youmans uses imagery and iteration of the same few details to tie together each chapter. For example, flowers play a special role in this novel. Mysterious white flowers sail down Little Jordan, which remind Meg of the flowers at Isadore’s child’s funeral and of the natural Southern landscape. Speaking from Meg’s point of view, Youmans scatters deft brushstrokes of the landscape with which she is so familiar among her observations about the Southern people. Describing Fred Massey’s tent-pitching, Youmans switches back and forth between sentences of natural description and of flashback:
“The surface [of the lawn] was coarse and stubbly after the early cutting, and in our dry hot June the new growth hadn’t forced the fresh stems through the old yet. There was a good spot for camping down near the stream. Years back Fred Massey’s father had rolled a lawn for tennis—back when he and Mrs. Massey were newlyweds and lived in our house. I can’t imagine Mr. Massey playing tennis. The lawn is partly tangled with blackberry canes, but in the center the grass grows smooth and green.” (23)
Youmans buttresses her commentary on the characters with simple sentences about flora, allowing the pictures of nature to speak for themselves. The back-and-forth quality of this type of writing lends the narrative a lighter-than-air feel. Youmans’s training in poetry reads clearly in passages such as this one.
Isadore too is a work of art. The most tragic character Youmans creates, Isadore suffers from the loss of her child and nearly commits suicide in her grief. Meg comes to know Isadore after the incidents and sees a different version of femininity and motherhood than her own mother provides. Youmans describes Meg’s first meeting with her: “[Isadore] held her hands to her face, as if she were looking in them, as though her hands were a mirror. She wore a white sundress that swept below her knees. Bending toward the glowing tree, she was nothing so much as a moth feeding upon a flower” (4). Isadore seems to be a part of the landscape. Perhaps because of her emotions, she is as raw in spirit and as rough as an animal. Just as in the tent-pitching scene, Youmans ties the character to the land and to the plants and animals inhabiting it. Isadore is as Southern as moths and blackberries in summertime, and she is a creature in line with the tragic Southern tradition. Youmans taps quietly into the tradition and further paints adult themes into Meg’s life.
In drawing from the tragic South, Youmans goes another level deeper into the story, involving Meg’s relationships with the various members of her family. Her father is absent, having left Meg and her mother before the events of Little Jordan take place. Her mother is drawn to the wrong sorts of men and Meg feels threatened by the invasion of the newest suitor in her mother’s world. Also, later in the novel, Meg visits her aging grandparents and must confront another aspect of mortality: “I remember the feel of his thick hair bunched in my fists—coarse and clean-smelling as sea grass. In those days we would scream, jolt across the sand; when I was thirteen, we often stopped to rest” (83). Youmans approaches the scene with subtlety, letting the reader travel along with Meg’s observations about the passage of time and of age.
While all of these elements make for a beautiful piece of artwork, Little Jordan feels packed too tightly with drama. Because the novel is so short, Youmans cannot fully delve into the psychological and emotional effects that finding Isadore’s child and her first love—among many of her various encounters—may have on Meg. The iterations build upon one another as ripples in a pond, but the novel never dips beneath the surface to observe the currents motivating the characters. Meg must come to terms with a child’s death, Isadore’s suicide attempt, her attraction to Fred, her grandparents’ aging, and her parents’ dysfunction, yet she hardly reacts at all. That amount of baggage is enough for one person to unpack over an entire lifetime and one hundred pages is too short for a project to fully engage these topics in a meaningful way.
While Marly Youmans offers a breathtaking coming-of-age novel, Little Jordan comes up short where it should explore the various challenges in Meg’s life. The novel is striking. The beautiful imagery sucks the reader in and, for one hundred pages, the reader will not want to let go of this novel. After the end, however, more questions are begged than answered and the reader is torn from this fantastic world before ever fully delving into it.
March 6, 2020
"I don't know nothing about anything - she never tells me about God, even though that's history, isn't it? - and last year in school I asked who Jonah was and everybody laughed at me. But I'm going to find out for myself."
Some of the most elegant, nostalgic prose I've read in years. I'm glad I picked this up at the library, tucked away on a shelf and half-hidden by much larger books. It's become one of my favorite books, and one that I feel like I was looking for for a very long time.
Some of the most elegant, nostalgic prose I've read in years. I'm glad I picked this up at the library, tucked away on a shelf and half-hidden by much larger books. It's become one of my favorite books, and one that I feel like I was looking for for a very long time.
July 17, 2024
“In the evenings when I watched the moon swim up out of the sea, my eyes were wet. I wanted her to stay the same, a round, unbitten apricot glowing on an invisible branch. But each night brought us a different moon”. - pg 100
The delicate distillation of the agony and pleasure in the summers of late childhood reminded me of Dandelion Wine by Bradbury.
The delicate distillation of the agony and pleasure in the summers of late childhood reminded me of Dandelion Wine by Bradbury.
May 10, 2023
I finished this book and audibly said “hmm”. This book deals with grief in all its stages and reverted me back to feeling 13 and growing up too fast. All in all a poetic and heavy little novella with some real sticking power.
January 21, 2024
This is a short but powerful book. The story documents tragedies through a child’s eyes. At times, the writing felt a little thick, like I was trudging through mud to get to the heart of what was being said, but the story was compelling.
October 6, 2012
In Marly Youmans' novella, LITTLE JORDAN, the most ordinary events -- adolescent infatuation, the bonds of mother and daughter, a mother's attachment and a young girl's fascination for a new born -- are rendered with profound beauty and breath-taking simplicity. These events are set in motion by a tragedy, the drowning of a 3-year old girl. Adolescent Meg finds the little girl floating in the waters of a local creek, Little Jordan. She is haunted throughout the book by this first stark encounter with death. It becomes the key to her understanding of all the things that happen to her during that eventful summer.
In the spirit of a Thomas Hardy novel, in which some natural feature of landscape becomes a brooding character in the story, the cool, riffling waters of Meg's home creek create an undertow of mystery as they "muscle past sharp ledges." During that summer, while the creek waters slide cold and dark in the background, Meg experiences her first kiss, comes to terms with her absent father and her mother's dubious taste in boy friends, and befriends the mother of the drown child who has given birth to a son.
This early novella will whet readers' appetites for the later, more sweeping works of Marly Youmans such as her wonderful Civil War novel, THE WOLF PIT acclaimed by another favorite Southern novelist of mine, Howard Bahr author of THE YEAR OF JUBILO and THE BLACK FLOWER. Also, readers should investigate two other works of Youmans -- CATHERWOOD and A DEATH AT THE WHITE CAMELLIA ORPHANAGE (still on my to-read list) not to mention her award winning poetry, which I've been familiar with for years. Any reader who wishes to sink into the sensual, intimate and beautifully realized worlds of Marly Youmans' writing can do no better than to begin at the headwaters of LITTLE JORDAN.
--Paul Corrigan
In the spirit of a Thomas Hardy novel, in which some natural feature of landscape becomes a brooding character in the story, the cool, riffling waters of Meg's home creek create an undertow of mystery as they "muscle past sharp ledges." During that summer, while the creek waters slide cold and dark in the background, Meg experiences her first kiss, comes to terms with her absent father and her mother's dubious taste in boy friends, and befriends the mother of the drown child who has given birth to a son.
This early novella will whet readers' appetites for the later, more sweeping works of Marly Youmans such as her wonderful Civil War novel, THE WOLF PIT acclaimed by another favorite Southern novelist of mine, Howard Bahr author of THE YEAR OF JUBILO and THE BLACK FLOWER. Also, readers should investigate two other works of Youmans -- CATHERWOOD and A DEATH AT THE WHITE CAMELLIA ORPHANAGE (still on my to-read list) not to mention her award winning poetry, which I've been familiar with for years. Any reader who wishes to sink into the sensual, intimate and beautifully realized worlds of Marly Youmans' writing can do no better than to begin at the headwaters of LITTLE JORDAN.
--Paul Corrigan
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May 29, 2023This is a quiet, ethereal little book written as a novel, but by a poet. And like a lot of novels written by poets, impression, effect, language, atmosphere, are privileged over plot. So at just over 100 pages (maybe less if I can remember which exact page it started on), this book is small in stature and impression.
I think this book would have been a love it or leave it kind of thing, love it or hate it, but the story is so in offensive, it comes across as a series of small moments that don’t come across strong enough for either feeling. Instead, it’s just small.
Here’s what it’s like:
“It’s the people who don’t really look who find things most often. And I wasn’t looking, at least not for her. I was just looking at the early morning, which had forgotten all about lost children and was busy drenching every song had flown upstream and to the ridge. Frogs shrilled a summer’s sound that made me think of nothing but being home from school for three long months. I read of jewelweed had sprung up around the banks, and its green foam broke against my legs, flecking them with leaves and curled snails. Ice-water mountain-cold it numbed my legs flashed a chill up my spine. ”
It’s a very North Carolina story. Small, slight, focusing on a young girl and her feelings and thoughts. It had some feelings not far from a lot of other Southern novels, but again it’s very small.
I think this book would have been a love it or leave it kind of thing, love it or hate it, but the story is so in offensive, it comes across as a series of small moments that don’t come across strong enough for either feeling. Instead, it’s just small.
Here’s what it’s like:
“It’s the people who don’t really look who find things most often. And I wasn’t looking, at least not for her. I was just looking at the early morning, which had forgotten all about lost children and was busy drenching every song had flown upstream and to the ridge. Frogs shrilled a summer’s sound that made me think of nothing but being home from school for three long months. I read of jewelweed had sprung up around the banks, and its green foam broke against my legs, flecking them with leaves and curled snails. Ice-water mountain-cold it numbed my legs flashed a chill up my spine. ”
It’s a very North Carolina story. Small, slight, focusing on a young girl and her feelings and thoughts. It had some feelings not far from a lot of other Southern novels, but again it’s very small.
August 10, 2016
This book is essentially a coming-of-age story of a young girl named Meg who lives with her divorced mother. Throughout the span of a summer she experiences a lifetime of events.
What I liked about this book was that it was quite touching. It shows the relationship of Meg with her mother. It shows her dealing with real life problems such as divorced parents and a new man in the household. We see as she comes to terms with her first love and the untimely death of others. In essence, we see this young girl growing up.
What kept me from giving this the other two stars is the lack of connection I had with Meg. This is quite a short novel, and throughout it, I felt as if I were just an outsider witnessing events happening to someone else - I was not immersed in the book. The main character, Meg, is somewhat bland. A longer story could have made it easier to connect with her, but I think the writing itself felt disconnected.
Overall, this is a nice, quick read. It isn't groundbreaking or the best book you'll read, but it is sweet and meaningful. It reminds us of growing up and accepting life for what it is.
What I liked about this book was that it was quite touching. It shows the relationship of Meg with her mother. It shows her dealing with real life problems such as divorced parents and a new man in the household. We see as she comes to terms with her first love and the untimely death of others. In essence, we see this young girl growing up.
What kept me from giving this the other two stars is the lack of connection I had with Meg. This is quite a short novel, and throughout it, I felt as if I were just an outsider witnessing events happening to someone else - I was not immersed in the book. The main character, Meg, is somewhat bland. A longer story could have made it easier to connect with her, but I think the writing itself felt disconnected.
Overall, this is a nice, quick read. It isn't groundbreaking or the best book you'll read, but it is sweet and meaningful. It reminds us of growing up and accepting life for what it is.
March 14, 2016
This first novel is wonderful and magical with the understanding of water! Even though there is a tragedy for a young mother, she recovers and has a sweet baby boy.
I found the book very poetic and lyrical with a rhythm and flow throughout the whole making me breeze through the pages. The sadness of the situations was often erased by the surreal changes in the atmosphere.
This young girl with a unique perspective on life and her situations. It became her journey and her story. She was there for many people and her dedication was soulful with a great wisdom of knowledge. She didn't seem to have much of a support system for herself; however, she kept giving to others.
The beauty of the journey came at the end with her connections to her grandparents.
I found the book very poetic and lyrical with a rhythm and flow throughout the whole making me breeze through the pages. The sadness of the situations was often erased by the surreal changes in the atmosphere.
This young girl with a unique perspective on life and her situations. It became her journey and her story. She was there for many people and her dedication was soulful with a great wisdom of knowledge. She didn't seem to have much of a support system for herself; however, she kept giving to others.
The beauty of the journey came at the end with her connections to her grandparents.
September 2, 2007
Conflict between a girl and her mother's boyfriend. The author currently lives in Cooperstown, NY.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews