Eden
A Novel
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A “profoundly raw and gripping” novel of a young girl in Mississippi struggling with poverty and a troubled family (The Baltimore Sun).
In Mississippi, fourteen-year-old Maddy Dangerfield has just impulsively drawn a naked woman on the pages of Genesis in bright red lipstick during Sunday service. The community is scandalized, and her devout, long-suffering mother’s response is to force her to spend weekends nursing her Aunt Pip—an outcast who lives on the edge of town.
Now Maddy moves between her own home—which she shares with her hard-working, Bible-reading mother and her drinking, gambling, womanizing father—and Commitment Road, where she serves as caregiver for her aunt, who is dying of breast cancer. Grievances from the past have left Pip estranged from the family, but as Maddy spends time with her and her eccentric neighbor, Fat, she begins to discover the exhilaration of speaking your own mind and living life on your own terms—as well as the cost extracted by both. And as she confronts the injustice and cruelty of the world around her, she will come to understand both the burden and the blessing of her newfound knowledge.
“The rural countryside of Pyke County, Mississippi, resembles a scorched paradise—an Eden after the fall, after the snake has brought darkness, disease and decay into the world.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Maddy Dangerfield, who is reminiscent of Celie in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple or Ellen Foster in Kaye Gibbons’s eponymous novel, must grapple with a cruel, impoverished existence . . . As emotionally powerful as it is poetic, Vernon’s raw and fierce first novel possesses a beautiful, albeit brutal, lyricism and introduces a strong new Southern voice.” —Library Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A young girl is sent to nurse her dying aunt in this arresting, uncompromising debut. Fourteen-year-old Maddy Dangerfield lives with her parents in rural Mississippi: her mother, Faye, obese and devoutly religious, is "a maid for damn near every white man in Pyke County"; her alcoholic, illiterate father, Chevrolet, works in a scrap yard and spends the family's money on whores and gambling. One of his sexual conquests was Faye's sister, Pip, who is estranged from the family as a result. To teach Maddy about mortality (and to assuage her own conscience), Faye sends Maddy to Pip's home on weekends to help care for her as she succumbs to breast cancer. What makes the book stand out is not its relatively simple plot, but Vernon's idiosyncratic prose style ("he laughed and folded his arms as if he controlled my vocabulary") and Maddy's stark, often surreal perception of the world. Her burgeoning sexuality is illustrated less by her crush on young laborer Landy Collins than by the way she describes the tangled mess of smells and sensations that define the people around her, who are "all, in some way, falling apart." The tone is relentlessly grim, infused with religious superstition, racism and death; macabre events Chevrolet's mutilation at the hands of his mother-in-law, the death of a troubled orphan, the slaughtering of a hog are scattered like land mines throughout. But what Vernon's story lacks in optimism, it more than makes up for with raw power and insight.
