The Mammoth Cheese

Holman, Sheri

ISBN 10: 1593551150 ISBN 13: 9781593551155

Publisher: Brilliance Audio, 2003

Synopsis

An Our Town for our times, The Mammoth Cheese is beautifully crafted and driven by warm, vibrant characters as it follows the residents of rural Three Chimneys, Virginia, on their journey to re-create the original Thomas Jefferson-era, 1,235-pound “Mammoth Cheese.” As the audiobook opens, the town is joyously celebrating the birth of the Frank Eleven: eleven babies simultaneously born to Manda and James Frank after fertility treatments. But as autumn progresses and the babies weaken, the community seeks to redeem itself through the making and transporting of a symbolic Mammoth Cheese to Washington, as a gift for the newly elected President Brooke. The cheese is the brainchild of August Vaughn, a farmhand by day and a President Jefferson impersonator by night, and the creation of Margaret Prickett, a single mother and cheese maker trying to save her century-old family farm.

Sheri Holman seamlessly weaves together the lives of Three Chimneys, delving into her characters’ inescapable family histories as they grapple with religion, divorce, politics, and unrequited love. The Mammoth Cheese is a triumphant exploration of the burdens and joys of rural America and the debts we owe to history, our parents, and ourselves.

About this title

Review

Sheri Holman's The Mammoth Cheese is the Mississippi River of novels. It winds along through most of the great themes of American fiction (tradition vs. innovation, the weight of the past, the dehumanizing effects of industrialization, the rifts between parents and children, men and women), picking up bits of history along the way, and carrying you wherever Holman wishes. The opening pages introduce at least 15 characters (not including the 11 premature babies born to dog trainer Manda Frank), a rough outline of the history of Three Chimneys, Virginia, and more information on small-farm cheesemaking than you might ever have thought you'd would want to learn, let alone absorb with fascination. Along with its moving themes, the pleasures of this novel are in Holman's grasp of human (and not only human) nature, and her gift for expressing this through unexpected details of daily life--that the cows in the local dairy give more milk when Sinatra's playing; that the dirty secret under an eighth-grade girl's mattress is Bride Magazine. Her inconspicuous flashes of verbal brilliance may go unnoticed by all but the most observant readers, but they lend sparkle to a complex and ambitious novel. --Regina Marler

About the Author

Sheri Holman is the author of A Stolen Tongue; Th e Dress Lodger, a New York Times Notable Book; and Th e Mammoth Cheese, short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction and a San Francisco Chronicle and Publishers Weekly Book of the Year.

About this edition

• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1593551150
• ISBN 13: 9781593551155
• Binding: Audio CD