Playing the Bones - Hardcover

Redd, Louise

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316735116 ISBN 13: 9780316735117

Publisher: Little Brown, 1996

Synopsis

Rather than planning her wedding, proper Texas girl Lacy Springs becomes involved in an affair with a local blues star, Black Jesus, and begins an obsessive pursuit of him while journeying into her own past to find the reasons why she keeps falling for the wrong men. A first novel. Tour.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Newcomer Redd blends unlikely ingredients--a strong and sassy Texan protagonist, satire, New Age hokum, and an exploration of the scars of childhood abuse--into a surprisingly assured debut. Lacy is a bread-baking redhead with a Ph.D. in comparative lit who teaches eighth grade in Houston. She's engaged to marry nice- guy Ellis but is preoccupied by her affair with Black Jesus, a famous blues musician. She's also attracted to Marcy, Black Jesus's brother, an aspiring rapper with gold teeth. Lacy tells all this to Eva, her turban-wearing therapist, while also grappling with her anger at her mother, who used to make her eat her dinner out of the dog's hair-ringed water bowl. Then, as a seven-year-old, she was sexually abused by overweight baby-sitter Donny. Eva sneaks Lacy into her childhood home for a recovery ceremony that involves burning a bundle of sage. Next, Lacy marries Ellis, then ducks out, on the pretext of a pilgrimage to Graceland, to join Black Jesus on tour. But the bluesman is arrested for beating up another woman, and Lacy returns home inspired to tell Ellis that their marriage is a sham. With her devoted husband on hold, Lacy gets down to some serious healing: She tells off her mother, confronts Black Jesus, and, with Eva in tow, heads back home for more ritual closure. Finally, Lacy tracks down and tells off Donny, finds satisfaction teaching illiterate adults, and learns to be by herself, presumably as a prelude to rejoining Ellis. The slow, subtle chronicle of this young woman's recovery is genuinely moving, despite Eva's silly excesses and a succession of kitschy backdrops that range from Elvis's grave through a cell in the county jail to the Texas Schoolbook Depository Building. First-novelist Redd paints modern-day Texas in all its gaudy glory, without trivializing her heroine's painful struggle and hard-won growth. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Equal parts recovery manual, travelogue and tall tale, Redd's first novel sings a bluesy ballad about Lacy Springs, an attractive young Texas schoolteacher wrestling with her dark and disturbing past. Raised in Dallas by her wealthy, abusive mother, Lacy, who teaches high-school English, lives in Houston with Ellis, her long-suffering fiance. Ellis may be tender and understanding, but that's not enough to stop Lacy from sneaking out for wild assignations with blues musician Black Jesus, her volatile, sensual lover. Even "my PhD in Comparative Literature does not prevent my heart from freezing up, and then thawing when I hear this man's foolish talk," she confesses. The story line traces Lacy's struggles to confront her demons. She's aided in this quest by a cut-rate New Age therapist, Eva, a loopy grad student in a Velcro-fastened turban, but when Lacy can't face Eva's questions, she scribbles lyrics on a legal pad, recasting into comfortably abstracted songs the themes that trouble her. Like the turbulent lives of the blues musicians she admires, Lacy's own existence grows increasingly dramatic as she juggles the promise of a stable domestic routine with Ellis and her exciting, sometimes violent, time on the road with Black Jesus. As the action shifts through the South, from Houston to Graceland, Redd provides evocative descriptions of a world where restaurants serve "salsa so hot it drives the confusion right out of your head." The plot takes some broad, almost farcical, twists that leaven the solemnity of Lacy's revelations but also come close to trivializing them. On the whole, though, this is an engaging and affecting examination of one woman's determined search for self-affirmation.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little Brown
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0316735116
• ISBN 13: 9780316735117
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 262