Patchwork - Hardcover

Osborn, Karen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151712921 ISBN 13: 9780151712922

Publisher: Harcourt, 1991

Synopsis

Two generations of women in a South Carolina mill town face the realities of family struggles and ties, unfulfilled dreams, rural working-class life, and lost, forbidden, and unfaithful love

About this title

Reviews

Poet Osborn's engrossing, well-crafted, poignant first novel examines both the harshness and the joy that meet three sisters in the mill town of Ash Hill, S.C. Full of brisk, true-to-life dialogue and action, the chapters are narrated alternately by Rose, strong and spiritual; Lily, the sexy, restless, good-time girl; June, the sheltered, unstable artist; and Sylvia, the daughter whom June can't remember and whom Rose raises as her own. In old age, Rose shares her home with her sisters once more, as Lily nurses her bitterness after two unfulfilling marriages and June lives in a comfortable fantasy world delineated by her paintings and her selective memory. Sylvia, who has gone to college and built a career as a travel writer, returns to Ash Hill to make peace with her turbulent past, realizing that "although Lily, June and Rose lived together and had shared much of what had happened in their lives, each one still held on to a separate way of seeing those events . . . . They'd all lived apart, alone."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A carefully crafted first novel by poet Osborn that touches in on the lives of three sisters raised in a dusty South Carolina milltown. They are Rose, Lily, and June, daughters of a dirt-poor cotton farmer, but three very different shoots from the same vine. Salt-of-the-earth Rose marries mill-worker Edward and leads a lean but very steady life, bearing three children and cleaving to the church as the troubles of even the most conscientiously lived life threaten to drag her down. Lily devotes herself to getting what she wants, which is chiefly sex, though personal license doesn't set her free since she can't keep herself from bad-seed Charles, her first husband, even after she divorces him and marries mill-boss Forrest. And poor June, who weds the town banker, gets institutionalized after attempting infanticide; her daughter, Sylvie, is taken in by Rose and develops a passionate, quasi-incestuous attachment to Rose's son, Benjy. The years shuttle by, leaving all three sisters together in old age, with widowed Rose working at the mill again, Lily watching soaps and having a hard time remembering to keep her clothes on, and June, released from the asylum, still living in a dream world. It's only Sylvie who manages to make her way out of the family tangle, marrying happily and working as a free-lance writer in San Francisco. Osborn creates a beguiling array of female voices here, and a very authentic sense of time and place. But her story is essentially undramatic, which is what keeps it from achieving the cathartic resonance of the tonally similar novels of Alice Walker. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This is the story of a poor South Carolina mill town family as told through the interwoven voices of three women. There is Rose, who is solidly good and constant; her wild, incorrigible sister Lily; and Sylvia, the intelligent daughter of their third sister, emotionally fragile June. From their varied perspectives interspersed through time from 1930 to 1981, the tumultuous saga is pieced together detailing the glories and insults of their lives. The writing is compelling and colored with rural dialect and idioms, but the separate voices skipping intervals of time make it sometimes difficult to track the connecting threads between each individual account. Perhaps this was the author's artistic and metaphorical intent--to create a "patchwork" story rather than one from whole cloth. Recommended.
-Shei la Riley, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harcourt
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151712921
• ISBN 13: 9780151712922
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 309