When Angels Rest - Softcover

Harrington, Donald; Harington, Donald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1582430365 ISBN 13: 9781582430362

Publisher: Counterpoint, 1999

Synopsis

The children of Stay More, Arkansas, play war games during World War II, but when soldiers preparing for an invasion of Japan occupy the hills, the real war reaches closer to home and the village takes on a new appearance.

About this title

Review

For decades, novelist Donald Harington has been assembling a piecemeal epic of the Ozarks. Most of the installments have revolved around the hamlet of Stay More, Arkansas--a backwoods flyspeck that, like the genuine hamlets the author chronicled in Let Us Build Us a City, seems almost surreally removed from the American mainstream. And most of these books, including the superb Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, are supremely funny and observant fictions.

Both of these adjectives apply to When Angels Rest, which is Harington's equivalent of the Iliad, circa 1942. The narrator, 12-year-old Dawny, is an avid participant in an ongoing set of war games. "There were the top dogs," he tells us, "led by fat Burl Coe until he got drafted and by Sog Alan in his absence, who called themselves Allies, from the privilege of feeling and sometimes being superior ... and there were the underdogs, who did not chose to be called Axis but had no choice. I certainly did not elect to be an Axis, let alone a despised Jap, but it fell my lot by default." In addition to being a foot soldier, Dawny is also an aspiring Ernie Pyle, who cranks out The Stay Morning Star entirely under his own steam. His narrative of this scaled-down war, and of the doings of his fellow Stay Morons, is as memorable as it is amusing. True, Harrington's energy seems to flag in the latter half of the book, when actual, gun-toting GIs are parachuted into the Ozarks for maneuvers--the last thing these characters need is an injection of reality. But When Angels Rest remains a touching, highly textured fable of childhood's end, narrated in an Arkansan twang that is the author's finest invention. --Bob Brandeis

About the Author

A tenured art history professor at the University of Arkansas, Donald Harington lives in Fayetteville with his wife, Kim. The Stay More novels, among them Butterfly Weed, Ekaterina, The Choiring of the Trees, and The Cockroaches of Stay More, have attracted a devoted following of readers, some of whom have become so enchanted as to strike out in search of Harington's fictional village.

Edition details

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1582430365
• ISBN 13: 9781582430362
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256