Tupelo native Minrose Gwin has penned quite a remarkable novel set in small town Mississippi during the tumultuous 1960s. The pre-teenaged protagonist named Florence (“Flo” for short) vacillates among several “homes”, one being the confusingly distraught primary home of her cake-baking emotionally unstable and alcoholic mother and her child abusing Ku Klux Klan leader father, the second being the home of her upstanding socially conscious, but sometimes distant grandparents, and the third being the home of her grandparents’ housekeeper and cook, Zenie.
Ironically, Zenie and her husband Ray’s home in Shake Rag becomes the place where Florence spends most of her growing up days sleeping and recuperating from her primary home life in the deep oppressive heat of a Mississippi summer, but it is also where she feels love, even though that love is sometimes complicated and stirred with mixed racial messages which Florence does not understand. A forward thinking educated niece comes to live with Zenie and Ray and tutors Florence in English grammar, particularly in sentence diagramming, since Florence has been tossed from one school system to another and is basically several grades behind where she should be. Eva also becomes a mother or older sister figure and introduces Florence to make-up and hair tricks which Florence’s mother neglects doing for her lonely daughter who has no friends. The only true happiness which Florence finds comes when her grandmother sends her to a two week camp in Mentone, Alabama, which will delight many Mississippi parents who drove their children to Lookout Mountain summer after summer for the long awaited delightful camp experience.
The reader will see the resemblance between Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird and Florence in The Queen of Palmyra immediately. Lee Smith, well known Southern author of many popular novels, including Oral History, Saving Grace, and On Agate Hill commented on The Queen of Palmyra, “Here it is, the most powerful and lyrical novel about race, racism, and denial in the American South since To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Jill McCorkle, also popular Southern author of the recent short story selection Going Away Shoes, said about The Queen of Palmyra, “A brilliant and compelling novel….the beauty of the prose, the strength of voice, and the sheer force of circumstance will hold the reader spellbound from beginning to end.”
Lemuria’s book club “Atlantis” has decided to choose this readable novel for our June pick. So, all readers are invited to join us on Thursday, June 3, to discuss The Queen of Palmyra . Also be sure to come join us on Wednesday, June 16, for the reading/signing by Minrose Gwin, who also teaches literary fiction at The University of North Carolina. Additionally a writer of creative non-fiction and poetry, she has written three scholarly books and is a coeditor of The Literature of the American South and Southern Literary Journal.
-Nan
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