What the Thunder Said
A Novella and Stories
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
What the Thunder Said is the 2008 winner of the WILLA Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction.
In the Dust Bowl of 1930s Oklahoma, a family comes apart, as sisters Mackie and Etta Spoon keep secrets from their father, and from each other.
Etta, the dangerously impulsive favorite of her father, longs for adventure someplace far away from the bleak and near-barren plains, and she doesn't care how she gets there; watchful Mackie keeps house and obeys the letter of her father's law, while harboring her own dreams. After the massive 1935 Black Sunday dust storm brings ruin to the family, the sisters' conflict threatens further damage. Seeking escape, and wagering their futures on an Indian boarding school runaway named Audie Kipp, the two leave home to forge their own separate paths, each setting off in search of a new life, each finding a fate different than she expected.
Through shifting perspectives, voices, and characters, What the Thunder Said tracks their wayward progress, following the sisters, their children, and those whose stories intersect with theirs as they range across the high plains of the West in the decades after the Great Depression. Etta's hitchhiking encounter with a bookish couple in the Garden of the Gods; a prairie jackrabbit drive, during which Mackie's son, Jesse, discovers the cloth he's cut from; an old man's failing memory as he tells of spying on an Indian loner on the outskirts of a Kansas town; a middle-aged doctor's chance meeting with a mysterious wayfarer while on a quest to New Mexico in search of his lost youth; and Mackie's late reconciliation with her aged father, whose habit of silence has bred her own---all are rendered in vivid prose that captures the plains and the people who endured devastation and lived to look back on it.
Slow-gathering, powerful, with passages of haunting beauty, What the Thunder Said is the long-awaited third work of fiction by one of our most acclaimed storytellers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The powers of nature drive a permanent wedge between two teenage sisters in the uneven second novel by National Book Award finalist (for The River Beyond the World, 1996) Peery. Sisters Mackie and Etta Spoon dutiful and a "pistol," respectively grow up on an Oklahoma farm battered into barrenness during the dust bowl years. The secrets they keep from each other (Etta knows the truth about Mackie's parentage; Mackie knows about Etta's secret lover) cause a rift that widens when they compete for the affections of Audie, a 17-year-old Indian drifter their father hires on as help. A series of misfortunes their mother dies, their father sells the farm sends the sisters in separate directions, but after they leave home, Peery's finely wrought narrative is subsumed by short story like chapters that, even at their best (the vivid chapter depicting Georgette, the daughter Etta abandoned as a baby, as an old woman on a wild journey of her own), lack overall cohesion. Peery's writerly gifts are substantial, but this isn't her finest work.