Jewelweed
A Novel
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4.4 • 21 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of Driftless, “a novel of forgiveness, a generous ode to the spirit’s indefatigable longing for love” (Minneapolis Star Tribune).
When David Rhodes burst onto the American literary scene in the 1970s, he was hailed as “a brilliant visionary” (John Gardner) and compared to Sherwood Anderson and Marilynne Robinson. In Driftless, his “most accomplished work yet” (Joseph Kanon), Rhodes brought Words, WI, to life in a way that resonated with readers across the country. Now with Jewelweed, this beloved author returns to the same out-of-the-way hamlet and introduces a cast of characters who all find themselves charged with overcoming the burdens left by the past, sometimes with the help of peach preserves or pie.
After serving time for a dubious conviction, Blake Bookchester is paroled and returns home. The story of Blake’s hometown is one of challenge, change, and redemption, of outsiders and of limitations, and simultaneously one of supernatural happenings and of great love. Each of Rhodes’s characters—flawed, deeply human, and ultimately universal—approach the future with a combination of hope and trepidation, increasingly mindful of the importance of community to their individual lives. Rich with a sense of empathy and wonder, Jewelweed offers a vision in which the ordinary becomes mythical.
“I liked Driftless, but his emotionally rich new novel, Jewelweed, a sequel of sorts, is even better. The novel emits frequent solar flares of surprise and wonder.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“[A] rhapsodic, many-faceted novel of profound dilemmas, survival, and gratitude . . . [a] refulgent hymn to the earth, ‘psychic strength,’ hard work, integrity, and love.”—Booklist (starred review)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There's a benevolent sort of rural American magical realism in Rhodes's latest ensemble novel, set in the Driftless region of southeast Wisconsin, where recently paroled Blake Bookchester returns from prison after serving over 10 years for drug trafficking. In the oddly isolated town of Words, Wis., Blake haltingly reintegrates himself into a vividly real landscape, but one that is peopled by a cast of characters too thoughtful to be believed. There's his unacknowledged son, Ivan, a 10-year-old whose profound reasoning gives him wisdom far beyond elementary school, and Ivan's best friend August Helm, a fifth-grader with a precocious vocabulary and a propensity for awkward exclamations too mannered for even a "gifted" child. Blake's father, Nate, is a truck-driving epicure struggling with his connection to his just-released son and the deep romantic feelings he has harbored for a distant cousin. Other residents of the town include a pastor with a crisis of faith, a sickly teenage boy, and a turbulent but determined single mother. Words is a place where small actions unfold slowly, with Rhodes sometimes bearing down too hard to make the point that actions and words of this size and simplicity have profound redemptive qualities.
