Flowering Mimosa - Hardcover

Petesch, Natalie L.M.; Petesch, Natalie L. M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804008701 ISBN 13: 9780804008709

Publisher: Swallow Press, 1987

Synopsis

Flowering Mimosa is a story of lost innocence and coming of age among the disinherited of America in the 1980s. Against a backdrop of social and economic disruption in the American southwest, Petesch traces the fates of the Wingfield family, who have lost their Texas farm and moved to a mining town in Silver Valley, Idaho.

As various tensions threaten to break the family apart, Tamsen Wingfield reacts most strongly. She cannot accept her new stepmother, married too soon after her mother's death. She cannot accept the new life of her father--once a strong, confident Texas farmer, now a lead miner working miles below the surface in a strange territory her high school textbooks cannot explain. Her flight from family and country is both an illusory attempt to recapture her youth and a courageous act of survival.

Flowering Mimosa has the scope of all truly great fiction, combining a sense of history with a vision of the future. Petesch's acute sense of place and detail bring the small towns of Silver Valley (Idaho), of Texas, and of central Mexico alive, and her strong lyric gifts create, especially in Tamsen and her precarious escape with a lover, perhaps the most memorable of what the Chicago Sun-Times has called “her Steinbeck-like children.” In Tamsen, Petesch dramatizes those political and social concerns which led the Times Literary Supplement to comment, “what is impressive is Petesch's ability ... to give a sense of what it was like, how it felt, to be an American ... .”

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Closely observed, efficiently rather than brilliantly written, this novel of three generations settles on a teenage girl as principal character. Beginning in rural Texas, moving to a mining town in Idaho, with an excursion into Mexico, it traces the ill fortune of the Wingfield family, driven from their land by the iron laws of economics. Tamsen, the girl, loathes her adulterous stepmother and, finding her life intolerable, tests her mettle by running off to Mexico with a local boy, whom she soon comes to detest. Steadily, implacably, she learns something about human nature and the ways of the cold world. Nothing triumphal happens and no great claims are madethis is essentially a 1930s setting revisited a half-century laterbut we are convinced that the lives of such people have been plausibly and feelingly depicted.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

For Tamsen Wingfield the delicate blossoms of the flowering mimosa nurtured by her mother on their Texas farm represent the lost innocence of childhood. Now Tamsen's mother is dead, her father has remarried, and the drought-stricken farm has been sold at auction. Transported to a bleak mining town in Idaho, Tamsen must undergo a series of initiation experiencesa brutal rabbit hunt, a solitary descent into a mine shaft, the discovery of her stepmother's infidelity, loss of faith in her boyfriend, being forced to beg for food on a Mexican street. The novel provides a sensitive account of Tamsen's adolescence, but its structure is loose and its style sometimes affected. Phrases like "sirenic song of the Salinas cicadas" are surely excessive.Albert E. Wilhelm, English Dept., Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Swallow Press
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0804008701
• ISBN 13: 9780804008709
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 241