Shelter
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In a West Virginia girls camp in July 1963, a group of children experience an unexpected rite of passage. Shelter is an astonishing portrayal of an American loss of innocence as witnessed by a drifter named Parson, two young sisters, Lenny and Alma, and a feral boy. Like Buddy, the wide-eyed boy so at home in the natural bower of the forest, Lenny and Alma are forever transformed by violence, by family secrets, by surprising turns of love. What they choose to remember, what they meet within and around the boundaries of the camp, will determine the rest of their lives. In a leafy wilderness undiminished by societal rules and dilemmas, Lenny and Alma confront a terrible darkness and find in themselves a knowledge never lent them by the adult world.
Visceral, filled with suspense and surprise, Shelter is an extraordinary achievement. Jayne Anne Phillips continues to explore family ties and generational complexities. She questions the idea of the existence of evil and brings to startling immediacy the primal divinity of the isolated, mountainous landscape of rural Appalachia. Shelter is a novel of transcendent beauty by one of the finest writers of our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A meticulous writer of luminous prose whose books appear at too rare intervals, Phillips here limns a dark, richly imagined story of evil confronting innocence in an Edenic atmosphere. Set in the West Virginia Appalachians in 1963, the narrative builds toward the fateful encounter of a group of polar opposites: four Girl Guide campers come into violent collision with a former convict, Carmody; his young son, Buddy, whom he cruelly abuses; and Parson, a Bible-obsessed, half-demented loner who considers himself God's instrument and is Carmody's nemesis. While it's obvious that Carmody and Parson are society's outcasts, the four girls also carry dark secrets. Alma Swenson has been forced to become an accomplice to her mother's affair with Nickel Campbell, the father of Alma's best friend, Delia; now Delia is fatherless after Nickel's suicide. Meanwhile, Alma's older sister, Lenny is burdened by repressed memories of her father's molestation, and her best friend, Cap Briarly, has been abandoned by her cold mother. Phillips reveals the emotional wellsprings of their behavior slowly, in a narrative permeated with sexual tension and a rising sense of menace. As she demonstrated in Machine Dreams , she is sensitive to children's thoughts and impressions; vulnerable, resourceful Buddy steals the reader's heart. She also gets girls' banter just right, but her real achievement is in conveying Parson's inchoate religious fervor and Carmody's vicious, drunken outbursts. Her prose is highly charged yet tightly controlled, palpable with intense visual imagery. The novel has a few lapses: some scenes are too mystic and opaque; some symbols (a snake, in particular) are over-emphasized. But the denouement, in which the main characters come together in a dramatic, almost cinematic confrontation, reconfirms Phillips as a masterly writer. Author tour.
