A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage - Hardcover

Youmans, Marly

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0881462713 ISBN 13: 9780881462715

Publisher: Mercer University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Winner of The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction

Winner of Silver Award for Fiction, ForeWord Book of the Year Awards

After a death at the White Camellia Orphanage, young Pip Tatnall leaves Lexsy, Georgia to become a road kid, riding the rails east, west, and north. A bright, unusual boy who is disillusioned at a young age, Pip believes that he sees guilt shining in the faces of men wherever he goes. On his picaresque journey, he sweeps through society, revealing the highest and lowest in human nature and only slowly coming to self-understanding. He searches the points of the compass for what will help, groping for a place where he can feel content, certain that he has no place where he belongs and that he rides the rails through a great darkness. His difficult path to collect enough radiance to light his way home is the road of a boy struggling to come to terms with the cruel but sometimes lovely world of Depression-era America.

On Marly Youmans's prior forays into the world of the past, reviewers praised her "spellbinding force" (Bob Sumner, Orlando Sentinel), "prodigious powers of description" (Philip Gambone, New York Times), "serious artistry," "unobtrusively beautiful language," and "considerable power" (Fred Chappell, Raleigh News & Observer), "haunting, lyrical language and fierce intelligence" (starred review, Publishers Weekly.) Howard Bahr wrote of The Wolf Pit, "Ms. Youmans is an inspiration to every writer who must compete with himself. I had thought Catherwood unsurpassable, but Ms. Youmans has done it. Her characters are real; they live and move in the stream of Time as if they had passed only yesterday. Her lyricism breaks my heart and fills me with envy and delight. No other writer I know of can bring the past to us so musically, so truly."
The first chapter is available to read or download at the Scribd site.

About this title

From the Author

Although I am one of those writers who tends to prefer the joy of making everything up, this book--my ninth--has strong connections to family and family places. The orphanage on a sharecropper's farm in the early part of the book is a rendering of my paternal grandparents' flimsy house and sharecropped farm near Lexsy, Georgia. I spent part of every summer there in my childhood. I also spent a great deal of time in Collins, where my maternal cousins and I loved to race to the railroad tracks and wave to the conductor or leave dull pennies on the rail to be transformed into bright copper. Other connections? My great-grandfather, Nathaniel Yeomans/Youmans had 22 legitimate children and also brought up two mixed race sons in his family after the death of their mother. One of those children was my grandfather's favorite brother in childhood. These were facts that I learned as a young adult, and they surprised me greatly--and taught me that no individual experience is quite like what we encounter in school history books. Also, my father's line is strange neurologically, and I am very well acquainted with the sorts of issues that plague Pip in his growing-up. After finishing the book, I realized that there's another sort of connection to the book. I spent my childhood being moved from place to place in a rough circle around the United States. After six years West and North I came home to the Carolinas, where I was born. Pip's journey in the book has certain parallels to that long journey. And I am afraid that a certain teacher, one who thought I surely must be retarded because of my s-l-o-w Southern drawl, may have had some degree of influence on the portrayal of Mrs. Ogrens. I tried to keep her out, but she insisted.

From the Back Cover

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage tells of a young boy's travels through the black heart of Depression America and his search for light both metaphorical and real.  Writing with a controlled lyrical passion, Marly Youmans has crafted the finest, and the truest period novel I've read in years.
--Lucius Shepard
*
Marly Youmans' new book is a vividly realized, panoramic novel of survival during The Great Depression. There is poetry in Youmans' writing, but she also knows how to tell a riveting story.
--Ron Rash
*
In A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Marly Youmans gives us a beautifully written and exceptionally satisfying novel. The book reads as if Youmans took the best parts of The Grapes of Wrath, On the Road, The Reivers, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and crafted from them a tale both magical and fine. Her rich language and lovely turns of phrase invite the reader to linger. Ironically, there is at the same time a subtle pressure throughout the novel to turn the page, because Youmans has achieved that rarest of all accomplishments: she has created a flawed hero about which we care. A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage is one of the best books I have read.
--Raymond L. Atkins

About this edition

• Publisher: Mercer University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0881462713
• ISBN 13: 9780881462715
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288