Glow
Mar 17, 2012
Glow
Author: Jessica Maria Tucelli
ISBN-13: 9780670023318
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Publication date: 3/15/2012
Overview
A breathtaking Georgia-mountain epic about the complex bond of mothers and daughters across a century.
In the autumn of 1941, Amelia J. McGee, a young woman of Cherokee and Scotch-Irish descent, and an outspoken pamphleteer for the NAACP, hastily sends her daughter, Ella, alone on a bus home to Georgia in the middle of the night-a desperate action that is met with dire consequences when the child encounters two drifters and is left for dead on the side of the road.
Ella awakens to find herself in the homestead of Willie Mae Cotton, a wise hoodoo practitioner and former slave, and her partner, Mary-Mary Freeborn, tucked deep in the Takatoka forest. As Ella begins to heal, the legacies of her lineage are revealed.
Glow transports us from Washington, D.C., on the brink of World War II to 1836 and into the mountain coves of Hopewell County, Georgia, full of ghosts both real and imagined.
Idgie Says:
This story hops around in history from the 1800s to the 1940s, telling the tale of an ancestral line of women. If you like a nice clean linear story, this may be a distraction for you.
While telling the story it blends true history, mysticism, racial integration and hostilities into a Southern family story. You not only have a family saga, but a nice history lesson at the same time. There are many books discussing Black and White relations in the South, but this one also puts the Indian heritage and racial mixing into the picture. As you can imagine, this racial mixture put some people at an even greater disadvantage than others.
The dialect/speech patterns are included in the story, which I enjoy, but it does require a little more concentration. A nice combination of history and fiction, a creation of characters that do come to life in the story.
Jessica Maria Tuccelli will be at the Georgia Center for the Book on March 26th!
________________________________________________
Reviewed by Idgie. If you would like to have the Dew review a book, please contact me at dewonthekudzu@gmail.com
