Tending to Virginia: A Novel - Hardcover

McCorkle, Jill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0912697652 ISBN 13: 9780912697659

Publisher: A Shannon Ravenel Book, 1987

Synopsis

This is the story of Virginia Turner Ballard, know to her North Carolina relatives as Ginny Sue. It's also the story of her mother, her grandmother, her great aunts, her closest cousin--three generations of women who gather around Virginia to help her at the end of a hard pregnancy, to tend to her, to help her prepare for the fourth generation. This kind of family attendance, this kind of tending to, is Southern to the core, offering, as it does, the occasion for reviving and trading entwined family stories. Tending to Virginia is a novel of one family's most important stories--how they happened, how they were perceived, how they were remembered, how their truth is revealed. In the end, an eruption of family confessions becomes revelation--revelation as legacy, passed down among a family's women; revelation as a family's gift in celebration of growing up, a process Jill McCorkle knows lasts into old age. In her characterizations of these vivid women playing out their generational roles in the contemporary South, McCorkle presents us with a powerful insight--that the strongest family bonds are, for better or worse, as often created by what is held back as by what is spoken.

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From the Inside Flap

"A profound picture of the legacies of families, one that will stay in the reader's mind."
--The Memphis Commercial Appeal

Virginia Suzanne Ballard is going home to Saxapaw, North Carolina, to sort things out--and to have the people she loves best help her through a difficult pregnancy.

The reunion is bittersweet. For as three generations of marvelous women tend to Virginia, long-held secrets are revealed, half-hidden truths confessed, and precious wisdom gained--of letting go and moving on. . . .

"Celebrates human connection, not the sort of passionate and exotic connection that all these women imagine, fear and desire, so much as the steady comfort of the familiar, the known, the reliable, which is perhaps synonymous with family."
--Atlanta Journal & Constitution

About this edition

• Publisher: A Shannon Ravenel Book
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0912697652
• ISBN 13: 9780912697659
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312