Logic: A Novel - Softcover

Vernon, Olympia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802141994 ISBN 13: 9780802141996

Publisher: Grove Press, 2005

Synopsis

After critics raved over Olympia Vernon's first novel, Eden, Vernon returns to the Deep South for the story of Logic, a young girl struggling to free herself from the unspeakable condition she refers to as "the butterflies floating inside" her.
As a child Logic Harris survived a fall from a tree-an accident that precipitated her transformation into a young girl lost in her own world. Logic's mother has secretly wished that Logic had not survived, and she now ignores the increasingly apparent evidence of the aberrant attention Logic's father bestows upon his daughter in her adolescence. As her mother retreats into her work as a neighborhood midwife and Logic's father collapses into paranoia, Logic is left to navigate alone what she scarcely understands. In inspired prose, stunning in its imaginative authority, Logic is a chilling allegory about the dangers of silence and a searing portrait of a girl lost in shame and fear, and a family and community too scarred by their own wounds to save her.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Vernon's follow-up to her acclaimed debut, 2003's Eden, is a dark and harrowing portrait of catastrophically scarred people in rural Valsin County, Miss. The sad story of Logic Harris, named after a word her mother saw in a magazine and pregnant by 13, will undoubtedly remind many readers of early Toni Morrison, particularly The Bluest Eye. Nearly killed as a child when she fell out of a tree, Logic is now "touched"-in every sense of the word: she "[doesn't] even talk in a straight line," and her father sexually abuses and impregnates her. But somehow, as Logic watches her neighbor's whoring and feels the growing "butterflies in her stomach," she retains an angelic innocence. All but abandoned by a used-up mother, who suffers "the drought of her wilted body" and secretly wishes her daughter dead, and an angry father teetering on the verge of insanity, Logic struggles to navigate the secrets and silences that have poisoned the adult world around her. Although Logic's hallucinogenic, disjointed outlook and language can be utterly incomprehensible at times, Vernon's alchemical imagination transforms passages that make no sense on their own ("a long death breathes nakedly behind the blood where red is turning sharp") into a whole as startlingly original, disconcerting and haunting as a fever dream.
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From Booklist:

The author of Eden (2002) offers another haunting, experimental novel set in a rural, mostly African American Mississippi community. "Too" Harris willfully blocks out the reality of what's happening in her family: her husband is routinely raping their daughter, Logic. Barely an adolescent and pregnant with her father's child, Logic has retreated into a nightmarish world of denial and symbolism. Surrounded by women--such as the prostitute across the street and the white woman for whom Too works--whose souls have been crushed by unspeakable violence, Logic turns for help to her only friend, a boy she calls the Tallest, the prostitute's son. When his help fails, Logic tries to find her own way out of misery. As in Eden, Vernon writes with astonishing, original poetry that finds the perpetrator and victim in everyone. Steeped in religious, surreal imagery and references to ordering principles--atoms, alphabets, life's basic materials--Vernon's abstract language examines the chances for survival in a lawless world where safety, love, and even joy are concepts, not realities. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0802141994
• ISBN 13: 9780802141996
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272