“Luce’s new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent”
The first line of the shiny new Charles Frazier novel that we’ll have the pleasure of selling on Tuesday. And a great line it is. As a parent of small children I at first thought that these children surely aren’t so different from all small children, but, well, they are. The next line:
“She learned early that it wasn’t smart to leave them unattended in the yard with the chickens. Later she’d find feathers, a scaled yellow foot with its toes clenched.”
No, Frazier’s protagonist in his third novel, Nightwoods, is in deep. She believes that “you take care of whatever needy things present themselves to you otherwise you’re worthless.”
Nightwoods is very different from Frazier’s earlier work. Set in the early sixties with bootlegging, juke joints, and mountains as a backdrop the reader might think of Thunder Road or the fiction of Ron Rash or even Tom Franklin’s Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. The plot is one that builds in suspense as Luce finds that she loves these new stranger children and that she is at risk of losing them.
Join us on Tuesday, October 11th for a signing and reading with Charles Frazier at 5:00 and 5:30.
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