The Mammoth Cheese
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. “A panoramic social novel with a needle-sharp point of view sends up both small-town America and politics” (People).
Acclaimed bestselling author Sheri Holman’s third novel, The Mammoth Cheese, has been hailed as “stunning . . . a Great American Novel par excellence” by Newsday and by The New York Times Book Review as “lovely, disarming . . . tough, sad and surprisingly sweet.”
Three Chimneys, Virginia resident Margaret Pricket, a single mother and specialty cheese maker, is in danger of losing all she holds dear. Her century-old family dairy farm is falling deeper into debt. Her thirteen-year-old daughter Polly, whom Margaret has tried to shelter from the modern world, is becoming perilously drawn towards her charismatic, subversive history teacher. Her loyal farmhand August, a Thomas Jefferson impersonator by night, is secretly in love with her. And she’s been convinced by the town’s pastor to recreate the original Thomas Jefferson-era, 1,235-pound “Mammoth Cheese,” as a gift for the President elect. Soon the entire town is wrapped up in the endeavor, and Margaret finds herself torn between her principles and her passions.
An American pastoral like no other, The Mammoth Cheese is a delicious and satisfying tour de force.
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book
A Publishers Weekly Book of the Year
A Book Sense 76 Selection
“Holman has fashioned a tale that is poignant and powerful and, like an award-winning cheese, surprisingly complex.”—The Washington Post Book World
“A capacious book. Huge and amazing things happen within it.”—The Minneapolis Star-Tribune
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in the jittery postboom present, in Three Chimneys, Va., this inventive, offbeat novel by Holman (The Dress Lodger),weaves a deft consideration of American history and political ideals into an exuberantly eccentric tale of smalltown life. With the help of fertility drugs, Manda Frank has just given birth prematurely to 11 babies, and the whole town is reveling in the media attention. But Manda can't quite bond with her fragile brood and feels besieged by their "glittering black fathomless eyes, full of seawater and accusation." Meanwhile, Manda's neighbor Margaret Prickett, about to lose her 18th-century dairy farm, strives desperately for face time with Gov. Adams Brooke, who is running for president on a profarm platform. So obsessed is Margaret with Brooke's candidacy that she blinds herself to 13-year-old daughter Polly's dangerously blooming crush on her American history teacher, as well as to a declaration of love by farmhand August Vaughn, a "living historian" who dresses up as Thomas Jefferson. Then the Frank babies start to die, the cameras leave town and the mood turns ugly. August's father, Pastor Leland Vaughn, comes up with a diversionary tactic: Margaret will recreate the 1,235-pound wheel of cheese presented to Jefferson by Massachusetts Baptists and deliver it to the newly elected President Brooke. What ensues on the banks of the Potomac is unconvincingly violent, but it's the only misstep in a work that dazzles with its combination of history, religion, political satire and tragedy. Every character here is a delicately nuanced, vivid creation even Margaret's cows, standing "dreamily by like bobbi-soxers, chewing their bright pink Bazooka cud."
