Items related to Night Ride Home
Synopsis
This is a new edition of Night Ride Home —the story of a smallAlabama mining town on the eve of World War II. Keller Hayesand Laura Sandifer are about to marry, Laura's father isthreatening to shoot Keller, and Bolivia, the town prostitute,is about to give birth to a baby whose father is a mystery.As that fateful December flips through the calendar andChristmas Eve arrives, a mine cave-in shifts attention toKeller's father, one of the trapped miners. And as the worldteeters on the brink of destruction, this small town will beforever changed and strengthened by its people and the demonsthey struggle to tame.In Night Ride Home , the metaphor of "home" is developedto perfection. But Covington's skill extends to more thancomparison and symbol; many of her sentences beg to be readaloud to savor their strength and beauty. Her descriptions areevocative and "Keller smiled. Evening was fallingteal blue. A thin coppery band of sunset painted the sky's edge.For as long as he could remember, he'd made this night ride homewith his parents. The sulphur scent of the scrap hill this timeof day mixed with Ben Ray's after-shave." And her evocation ofemotional states is as spare and skillful as her"It was his third day without a drink. His head was light, likean empty home before the movers come. The bad part was that noone knew just how remarkable it all was. Three days."Covington's insight into many of the characters in NightRide Home is a triumph of understanding and of compassionas well, for she introduces characters who seem unapproachableand then, she becomes them, and it is in doing so that her workas an artist becomes most we see that no one is beyondthe pale, that no sins are too great for forgiveness, that eventhe most hardened and callous people have humanity at their cores.About theVicki Covington is the author of Bird of Paradise, GatheringHome , and Cleaving (co-authored with her husband, Dennis), a1999 Library Journal best book of the year. She lives inBirmingham, Alabama, with her husband and two daughters andis a regular contributor to the Oxford American . Her shortfiction has also appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines.
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About the Author
Vicki Covington is the author of Bird of Paradise, Gathering Home, and Cleaving (co-authored with her husband, Dennis), a 1999 Library Journal best book of the year. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her husband and two daughters, and is a regular contributor to The Oxford American. Her short fiction has also appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines.
From Kirkus Reviews
Alabama is the setting for Covington's third novel, as it was for Gathering Home (1988) and Bird of Paradise (1990). This one combines a coming-of-age story with a mining disaster and a Christmas miracle. It's late 1941, Pearl Harbor time. In a small mining town, two families are bracing for a difficult wedding. Nineteen-year-old Keller Hayes lives in a tiny company house with mine-worker father Ben Ray and mother Tess, a church-singer. Higher up the social scale are the Sandifers: filling-station owner Sandy, otherworldly wife Grace, and grease-monkey daughter Laura. The problem is Sandy, a mean drunk who's mighty sore at losing Laura to a miner's son and is threatening violence. Another worry for Keller is his unconventional mother's decision to invite Bolivia, the sweet- natured, gypsy-like town whore, who is pregnant; Keller suspects (correctly) that he's the father. But Bolivia's presence proves a godsend: she knows how to handle Scotty, another client, and literally disarms him. Keller competes with these characters (and Charles, the junkman who adores Bolivia) for the spotlight; then a mine wall collapses, killing some miners, trapping Ben Ray and others, and the disaster predominates. Covington shows, simplistically, how death energizes the living; even Sandy turns into a Good Samaritan, laying off the booze to help rescue his enemy Ben Ray, who emerges with a broken leg. Bolivia, though, is responsible for a greater miracle: After her baby is stillborn, black and white mourners come together at the funeral. That's a first. It's also a moment of excessive sweetness; all these people are just a little too good to be true, amiable lightweights, and this undercuts Covington's vision of a community bloody-but- unbowed. Decent work, then, but without much of a payoff. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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