Items related to Change Baby: A Novel
An award-winning writer's debut novel about a young woman's return to her Southern roots and to the secrets of who she is.
Avie Goss is a change baby-a baby born late in her mother's life, almost a generation after the births of her two siblings. When her mother nearly dies in a house fire, Avie returns home to the South she abandoned after college. There, she tends to her ailing mother and begins to unravel the story of who she is-and to uncover a different picture of a way of life that has all but vanished. Slowly, as she makes sense of her family's legacy, she begins to build a new life for herself in a landscape with which she must come to terms.
June Spence's astonishing talents as a literary stylist, which were so highly praised on the publication of her story collection, Missing Women and Others, are stunningly exhibited in this impressive debut novel. As Larry Brown wrote about her stories, "In her beautiful sentences June Spence writes with knowledge and intelligence, with wit and insight, and a generous helping of compassion."
Avie Goss is a change baby-a baby born late in her mother's life, almost a generation after the births of her two siblings. When her mother nearly dies in a house fire, Avie returns home to the South she abandoned after college. There, she tends to her ailing mother and begins to unravel the story of who she is-and to uncover a different picture of a way of life that has all but vanished. Slowly, as she makes sense of her family's legacy, she begins to build a new life for herself in a landscape with which she must come to terms.
June Spence's astonishing talents as a literary stylist, which were so highly praised on the publication of her story collection, Missing Women and Others, are stunningly exhibited in this impressive debut novel. As Larry Brown wrote about her stories, "In her beautiful sentences June Spence writes with knowledge and intelligence, with wit and insight, and a generous helping of compassion."
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About the Author:
June Spence's stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1997, The Southern Review, Seventeen, and The Oxford American. She is the winner of the Mary Ruffin Poole Award for First Work of Fiction, the winner of the 1995 Willa Cather Award, and was selected as a writer to watch in the year 2000 by the Raleigh News & Observer. Her collection, Missing Women and Others, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
From Publishers Weekly:
In this impressive first novel, a young woman discovers skeletons long hidden in the family closet. Avie Goss was born 24 years ago, just before her mother's menopause and long after her two "more suitably timed siblings." She trusted that once she left her hometown of Regina, N.C., "the future would cough up its gems," but she's now a recovering alcoholic in a dysfunctional relationship with a married man. When her 73-year-old mother, Mabry, is injured in a house fire, Avie returns home to care for her. She seeks out Mabry's cousin and oldest friend, Zephra, curious about the rift between them, and is told that the two women aren't really kin. From this first revelation, more secrets unfold, including the true nature of the bonds between Zephra, Mabry and her dead husband, and even between Avie and her siblings. Spence's prose is deft, forceful and quirky ("my thoughts darted in every direction, small, excitable fishes"), but never overbearing, and her alternating narrators (Avie, Zephra and Mabry) have delightful voices. And when sparks fly between the agnostic Avie and a young pastor, Spence handily provides comic relief and the pleasures of young love. Despite an ending in which loose ends are tied up a little too tidily, Spence, who garnered much praise for her 1999 collection, MissingWomen and Others, delivers a true winner.
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherRiverhead Hardcover
- Publication date2004
- ISBN 10 0641883137
- ISBN 13 9780641883132
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages230
- Rating
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