Kind of Kin - Hardcover

Askew, Rilla

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1410459810 ISBN 13: 9781410459817

Publisher: Thorndike Press, 2013

Synopsis

All of Cedar, Oklahoma, is shocked when Bible-believing Bob Brown and his friend, Pastor Jesus Garcia, are tossed in the county jail for hiding a barn-full of Mexicans. Thanks to an ambitious blonde state legislator and her politically shrewd husband, it's a felony to harbor an undocumented immigrant in the Sooner State. 
It's bad enough that her Christian daddy is a felon, but now Bob Brown refuses to defend himself, creating a mess of trouble for his daughter, Sweet. She's got enough on her hands caring for her husband's bedridden elderly great-grandfather, and trying to keep her son, Carl Albert in line. Now, she's got her ten-year-old nephew Dustin to worry about, too. A quiet and thoughtful boy, Dustin hasn't had it easy. His mother is dead, his older sister Misty Dawn is looking for her recently deported husband, and Carl Albert beats up on him. Sweet is trying to hold it all together, but the more she tries to fix things, the faster her life unravels. When Dustin disappears and Misty Dawn shows up with needs of her own, Sweet's sense of guilt and responsibility drive her to desperate actions that test her family, friends, and neighbors in unexpected and revealing ways. 
A story of complicated lawmakers and lawbreakers, Christian principle and political scapegoating, Rilla Askew's funny and poignant novel explores what happens when upstanding people are pushed too far--and how an ad-hoc family, and ultimately, an entire town, will unite to protect its own.

About this title

About the Author

Rilla Askew is the author of four novels and a book of stories. Her first novel, The Mercy Seat, which had its seeds in old stories about her family's migration into Indian Territory, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and received the Oklahoma Book Award and the Western Heritage Award in 1998.  Fire in Beulah, her acclaimed novel about the Tulsa Race Riot, received the American Book Award and the Myers Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in 2002, and was selected as the centennial book for Oklahoma's One Book One State program in 2007.  Her novel Harpsong received seven literary awards including the Oklahoma Book Award, the Willa Cather Award from Women Writing the West, the Violet Crown Award from the Writers League of Texas, and the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.
 
A 2009 recipient of an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a former Fellow at Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbertide, Italy, Askew was a featured reader at the 2008 International Chinese and World Literature Conference in Beijing. She is married to actor Paul Austin and they divide their time between Oklahoma and their home in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York.
 
 
The American Academy of Arts and Letters citation for 2009 Academy Award in Literature:

"Five generations of Rilla Askew's family have occupied southeastern Oklahoma. Celebrating this birthright, she has concocted of it her own Faulknerian kingdom. Askew is writing a mythic cycle, novels and stories that unsettle our view of the West's settling. In a continuous fictional mural populated with hardscrabble souls - credible, noble and flawed - Askew is completing the uncompleted crossing of the plains. Trusting prose that is disciplined, luxuriant and muscular, she is forging a chronicle as humane as it is elemental."

Allan Gurganus
May 20, 2009
 

Edition details

• Publisher: Thorndike Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1410459810
• ISBN 13: 9781410459817
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 615