Synopsis
When forty-year-old Isaac Overstreet, a fisherman and community mainstay, decides that he wants a wife, the residents of turn-of-the-century Camp Ruby, Texas, decide that young Bessie Treadway fits the bill
Reviews
Elizabeth Treadway was standing in the Sabine River, her three pet cranes nearby, when Isaac Overstreet came down from Camp Ruby in search of a wife. She didn't even wave goodbye to her sisters when she climbed in Isaac's boat and told him he'd found what he'd been looking for. Settling in to Camp Ruby, something less than a bona fide town in turn-of-the-century East Texas, Bessie Overstreet makes a home of Isaac's ramshackle house, establishes herself with the townspeople, and begins her life-long effort to hybridize a purple daylily. Soon their twin daughters, the Ruby-Jewels, are born, and some years later another girl, ever-cranky Zeda Earl. The people of Camp Ruby accept life's mysteries and each others' eccentricities as comfortably as they live on the shifting shore of the Sabine. The twins leave home to live with the teacher's son high in an abandoned water tower, where they patch prize-winning crazy quilts; Isaac fishes on the Sabine with a clumsy angel; the deranged Billy Wiggins brings satisfaction to the doctor's insatiable daughter. While neither their superstitions nor wisdom can withstand the inroads of progress, something of their quirky grit lasts. In the end, it's the least likely Zeda Earl in whom the spirit of the time and place is carried on. Swift exhibits plenty of his own wisdom and imagination in this novel, following Splendora and Principia Martindale.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Camp Ruby, in the Sabine River backwoods of east Texas, seems always slightly off center to the discerning eye, and the people who live there accommodate and enhance that view with their own eccentricities based on a heritage of poverty, mysticism, superstition, and naivete. Zeda Earl Overstreet, a minor character in Swift's earlier novel Splendora , becomes a focus of this turn-of-the-century novel as she struggles from birth to escape from camp Ruby and find her place in life, to return years later to contentment that only exists at home. Zeda Earl's story blends with the lives of her mother, sisters, neighbors, and friends, all of whom contribute to the intricate tapestry that is the town. Written in a grand style reminiscent of legend, this offbeat novel will appeal to a select audience. Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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