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A Place with Promise: A Novel
The magical multigenerational saga of an unforgettable Texas family
At the turn of the twentieth century, Isaac Overstreet goes looking for a bride and finds Elizabeth “Bessie” Treadway standing in the middle of the Sabine River. Leaving her sisters without explanation, carrying her three pet cranes, Bessie slips into Isaac’s boat and returns with him to Camp Ruby—a tiny backwoods East Texas community too humble to be called a real town.
In Isaac’s broken-down shack, they start a family together. First come the twin daughters, the Ruby-Jewels, followed by Zeda Earl, always sour and dissatisfied with the life she has been born into.
For all of Zeda Earl’s ennui, there is magic on the shores of the Sabine, where angels fish and the seriously deranged sometimes bring about miracles. For the Overstreets and their eccentric friends and neighbors, every day in Camp Ruby holds new wonder—until the simple ways they have come to rely on are threatened by a dangerous unwanted interloper called progress.
Edward Swift, the acclaimed author of Splendora and Principia Martindale, brings us a fable for our time—a wondrous tale of family and community, rich in color and imagination and suffused with everyday magic.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Isaac Overstreet goes looking for a bride and finds Elizabeth “Bessie” Treadway standing in the middle of the Sabine River. Leaving her sisters without explanation, carrying her three pet cranes, Bessie slips into Isaac’s boat and returns with him to Camp Ruby—a tiny backwoods East Texas community too humble to be called a real town.
In Isaac’s broken-down shack, they start a family together. First come the twin daughters, the Ruby-Jewels, followed by Zeda Earl, always sour and dissatisfied with the life she has been born into.
For all of Zeda Earl’s ennui, there is magic on the shores of the Sabine, where angels fish and the seriously deranged sometimes bring about miracles. For the Overstreets and their eccentric friends and neighbors, every day in Camp Ruby holds new wonder—until the simple ways they have come to rely on are threatened by a dangerous unwanted interloper called progress.
Edward Swift, the acclaimed author of Splendora and Principia Martindale, brings us a fable for our time—a wondrous tale of family and community, rich in color and imagination and suffused with everyday magic.
225 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 16, 1987
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 24, 2021
This is my second Edward Swift book and I really enjoyed it. A Place With Promise is the tale of a group of eccentric people living along the Sabine river in turn-of-the-century East Texas.
Be warned that the story is somewhat farfetched and not politically-correct at times but that's okay, I don't think the author meant for the story to be taken too seriously.
To further try to describe this book, I'd have to say that if you mixed up Michael McDowell's Blackwater with Daniel Wallace's Big Fish you might come close to a story like this. If this book was to ever be made into a film, Tim Burton would have to direct.
If you need something different and odd to read, pick this book up, you'll love it.
Be warned that the story is somewhat farfetched and not politically-correct at times but that's okay, I don't think the author meant for the story to be taken too seriously.
To further try to describe this book, I'd have to say that if you mixed up Michael McDowell's Blackwater with Daniel Wallace's Big Fish you might come close to a story like this. If this book was to ever be made into a film, Tim Burton would have to direct.
If you need something different and odd to read, pick this book up, you'll love it.
September 5, 2008
Another foray into the decidedly autobiographical East Texas World of Edward Swift's childhood. Swift loves his Camp Ruby people, and treats them with the respect and affection due these lovable, eccentric loonballs. Gentle, wise and insightful.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews