The Curing Season - Softcover

Wells, Leslie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 044667866X ISBN 13: 9780446678667

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2002

Synopsis

It's 1948 on a tobacco farm in southern Virginia and a poor farm girl hopes to break away from an abusive father by finding a suitor to rescue her. But for Cora Slaughter, a slight deformity forces her to live in the shadow of her sister Sibby, who basks in the attention of all the local boys. Tormented by the thought that she will grow up to be a spinster, and teased by her schoolmates, Cora takes refuge in the books that her teacher lends her. But life takes a dramatic turn when Cora meets a dark, handsome stranger who comes to town looking for work. What she doesn't realize is that the life she is escaping is ideal compared to the hell she is about to enter.

About this title

About the Author

Leslie Wells has been a book editor for the past 20 years. She spent part if her childhood on a tobacco farm in southern Virginia, and now lives in Long Island, New York.

From Publishers Weekly

Set in the tobacco-farming country of southern Virginia in 1948, this dark first novel describes an existence not much different from life in the antebellum era. Crops are still harvested by hand, blacks and whites live in separate if often similar worlds and white children walk to one-room schoolhouses. Narrator Cora Mae Slaughter, 16, one of four children of a struggling white tenant farmer and his downtrodden wife, is an avid reader who finds a haven in that schoolhouse, not only from her alcoholic and brutal father but also from the mockery of her classmates, who tease her about her clubfoot. Afraid she'll never have a boyfriend, Cora is easy prey for itinerant farm laborer Aaron Melville. Seduced as much by Aaron's apparently superior background as by his kisses, Cora follows him to a cabin, where he rapes her. Shamed and hopeful of winning his love, she stays with him, and they rove from farm to farm in search of work. After the birth of baby Joshua, Aaron's behavior improves for a time, but before long, he begins to mistreat Cora in increasingly painful and perverse ways. The reader hopes that she'll succeed in breaking away from Aaron's control, as she does in establishing a friendship with a young black woman. Wells idealizes the women's relationship beyond credibility, however, and she also fails to make Cora's acquiescence and entrapment plausible. Cora's tale rings most true not when she is describing, often in clich‚-ridden prose, her suffering and salvation, but in Wells's faithful renditions of southern Virginia speech and customs. The set piece on the hand curing of tobacco (which gives the book its double-meaning title) is a fascinating depiction of a bygone way of life. 5-city author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 044667866X
• ISBN 13: 9780446678667
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272