The School on Heart's Content Road - Softcover

Chute, Carolyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802144152 ISBN 13: 9780802144157

Publisher: Grove Press, 2009

Synopsis

Carolyn Chute’s newest paperback returns to her beloved town of Egypt, Maine and delivers a rousing, politically charged portrait of those living on the margins of our society.
The School on Heart’s Content Road begins with Mickey Gammon, a fifteen-year-old dropout who has been evicted from home and seeks shelter in the Settlement—a rural cooperative in alternative energy, farm produce, and local goods, founded by the Prophet.” Falsely demonized by the media as a compound of sin, the Settlement’s true nature remains foreign to outsiders. There, Mickey meets another deserted child, six-year-old Secret Agent Jane”—a cunning, beautiful girl whose mother is in jail on false drug charges and who prowls the Settlement in heart-shaped sunglasses, imagining her childish plans to ruin the community will win her mother’s freedom. As they struggle to adjust to their new, complex surrogate family, Mickey and Jane witness the mounting unrest within the Settlement’s ranks, which soon builds to a shocking crescendo.
Vehement and poetic, The School on Heart’s Content Road questions the nature of family, culture, and authority in an intensely diverse nation. It is an urgent plea from those who have been shoved to the fringes of society, but who refuse to be silenced.

About this title

About the Author

Carolyn Chute is the author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine; Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts; Snow Man; and Merry Men, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Thorton Wilder Fellowship. She currently lives in Maine with her husband.

From AudioFile

Carolyn Chute returns to Egypt, Maine, exploring the militia mentality and alternative lifestyles attractive to the poor. This powerful and disturbing story follows the consequences of attitudes and actions not at all unusual in pockets of rural poverty. Susan Ericksen's characterizations nail Chute's protagonists--from an abandoned 6-year-old to a polygamous male cult leader, his wives, and militia members of varied states of sanity and age. Unfortunately, Ericksen's inconsistent mispronunciations of common Maine names and places jolt the familiar listener and distract from her otherwise fine narration. Likewise, she imparts a heavy Parisian-French accent to speakers of the Franco-American dialect. Overall, Ericksen wisely refrains from attempting a Maine accent. A pronunciation check of proper nouns would render this performance perfect. R.L.L. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0802144152
• ISBN 13: 9780802144157
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400