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Mourning the Death of Magic
Mourning the Death of Magic
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1977
19 people want to read
About the author
Blanche McCrary Boyd
10 books34 followersBlanche McCrary Boyd (born 1945) is an American author whose novels are known for their eccentric characters.
Among the awards Boyd has won are a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993–1994, a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship in 1988, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the South Carolina Arts Commission in 1982–1983 and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1967–1968. She was nominated for the Southern Book Award for The Revolution of Little Girls in 1991, and also won the Lambda Literary Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction that same year. She was nominated for the Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction again in 1997.
(from Wikipedia)
Among the awards Boyd has won are a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993–1994, a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship in 1988, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the South Carolina Arts Commission in 1982–1983 and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1967–1968. She was nominated for the Southern Book Award for The Revolution of Little Girls in 1991, and also won the Lambda Literary Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction that same year. She was nominated for the Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction again in 1997.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 9, 2025
That ending was odd. I don’t feel like I understand any of the characters. There were lovely descriptions, though.
August 24, 2019
"And then the plane landed in Atlanta, and he switched to a a smaller plane, and the smallness of the plane made tears in his eyes, the unimportance of the place he was going to, how it dominated him and moved him...he wanted to face it, he wanted to exorcise it. Or maybe, just maybe, he wanted to return for good."
Before I picked this novel up in a used bookshop in Charleston, I'd only read Boyd's delightful collection of essays (The Redneck Way of Knowledge). What can I say, except that I'm a sucker for any story which features a Southern expatriate as one of the protagonists. Boyd's prose is swift and honed, and I had no idea she was also a novelist. The characters are compelling here. Unfortunately, they're all in the search of a plot, the only detraction from Boyd's excellent writing, but it's not a minor one. I haven't read many novels written in the early Seventies, and I'm wondering if that's simply a reaction to a much troubled time. I found the depiction of the civil rights strike in Charleston in 1969 fascinating, considering it's the fiftieth anniversary this year, and I never heard about it, the whole time I was growing up in South Carolina. Boyd definitely captures the complicated nature of the South in this work, and its confounding ability to sweep so much of its ugly past under the rug as it puts on a gracious face. I'm glad I read this. Boyd doesn't often come up in many discussions of writers from the South--perhaps that's because she left it. I think she's been overlooked for too long.
Before I picked this novel up in a used bookshop in Charleston, I'd only read Boyd's delightful collection of essays (The Redneck Way of Knowledge). What can I say, except that I'm a sucker for any story which features a Southern expatriate as one of the protagonists. Boyd's prose is swift and honed, and I had no idea she was also a novelist. The characters are compelling here. Unfortunately, they're all in the search of a plot, the only detraction from Boyd's excellent writing, but it's not a minor one. I haven't read many novels written in the early Seventies, and I'm wondering if that's simply a reaction to a much troubled time. I found the depiction of the civil rights strike in Charleston in 1969 fascinating, considering it's the fiftieth anniversary this year, and I never heard about it, the whole time I was growing up in South Carolina. Boyd definitely captures the complicated nature of the South in this work, and its confounding ability to sweep so much of its ugly past under the rug as it puts on a gracious face. I'm glad I read this. Boyd doesn't often come up in many discussions of writers from the South--perhaps that's because she left it. I think she's been overlooked for too long.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews