Night Ride Home - Softcover

Covington, Vicki

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804111529 ISBN 13: 9780804111522

Publisher: Ivy Books, 1993

Synopsis

On the eve of World War II in an Alabama mining town, Keller and Laura prepare for marriage, Laura's father threatens Keller, and Bolivia, a Portuguese woman, is about to give birth to a baby whose paternity remains a mystery. Reprint.

About this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ivy Books
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804111529
• ISBN 13: 9780804111522
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 240