Private Altars: A Novel - Softcover

Mosby, Katherine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425171264 ISBN 13: 9780425171264

Publisher: Berkley Trade, 2000

Synopsis

A portrait of two generations of the Daniels family explores the lives of a dynasty of eccentric misfits and outsiders in a small West Virginia town and their impact on a town dedicated to its own stagnation. A first novel. Reprint.

About this title

About the Author

Katherine Mosby, a poet, teaches writing courses at Columbia and New York University, and conducts poetry workshops in New York public schools.

From Publishers Weekly

Vividly Southern in conception, poet Mosby's first novel is hindered by ornate, rambling, overheated sentences: "The keen sense of loss he had felt, years before, when his wife had taken Addison and twenty dollars in cash and left to devote herself to a religion that had claimed her with the suddenness and passion of a fever, had been gradually replaced with a pervasive disappointment by which he felt ennobled, and with which he held himself aloof from further pain." It's too bad that a writer like Mosby, with her strong sense of plot, character and dialogue, would swaddle parts of her novel with such neo-Victorian wordage. The author's characters and story are engaging, involving a classic conflict in the mid-1920s between a small world (Winsville, W.Va.) and a large-minded outsider (Vienna Daniels). Brought South by her new husband Willard, Vienna, a New Yorker, laughs "at the things Winsville took seriously" and employs "her tongue with the quick grace of a rapier"-sometimes to her own misfortune. When dropped by Willard, she must invent her life all over again, even in Winsville; and so the novel also takes in the adventures of her two children, wayward Willa and Elliott. But though the tale is lively and Mosby's wit evident, the writing here falls short enough, often enough, to irritate. BOMC alternate.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Berkley Trade
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0425171264
• ISBN 13: 9780425171264
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 331