The Secret of Hurricanes
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Pearl Starling is forty-five, a hermit with a 'colorful past' — a past filled with treachery and desire, death and survival — who makes her living weaving rugs in a North Carolina military town. For years she has been an object of curiosity and scorn, and now she has defied the society’s conventions once again: she is pregnant and no one knows who the father is. In 'The Secret of Hurricanes' Pearl tells her unborn child about how she has weathered the 'hurricanes' in her life — from religiously reading the local newspaper to drawing inspiration from the Kennedy's abiding strength in the face of tragedy. Traveling the dark roads of her past, Pearl reveals how her need for tenderness led to sexual confusion, a relationship with a much older man, and her part in a murder thirty years ago.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's a pity that Oprah has shuttered her book club, since this first novel about a woman overcoming a fractured past might have found a home with her. From the works of Flannery O'Connor to Denis Johnson, Southern literature has made a special place for eccentrics, and this solid debut slow moving but undeniably lyrical bears out that connection. Pearl Starling is a 45-year-old hermit whose mysterious pregnancy is the talk of Waterville, N.C. She deals with her fellow townspeople including the Pentecostal missionaries who show up at her door each day with sardonic humor, but her brave front obscures a childhood poisoned by abuse, murder and a stay in Hollingsworth, a reform school that left her "a little crazy." Even as she jealously guards the identity of her child's father, Pearl shares with the reader her dour recollections of her own alcoholic father, the troubled teenagers who became her companions and the events that landed her in Hollingsworth. Much of this involves the Hunnycutts, Waterville's most prominent family, whose material success is undercut by Floyd Hunnycutt's sinister relationship with his daughters. Though the subject of incest may have lost its ability to shock or even surprise, Williams lends it the necessary gravity. Her main stylistic flaw is an overreliance on fragments for dramatic effect: "And I know she's part of my own wet heart. That she'll always be. That I'll always dream about her." Still, this is a promising first effort from an author with a distinctive voice.
