Women of Granite - Hardcover

Jennings, Dana Andrew

2.83

6 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151983674 ISBN 13: 9780151983674

Publisher: Harcourt, 1992

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In a poverty-stricken New England town, women have, through their indomitable will to survive crushing hardships, created a truly matriarchal society. By the author of Mosquito Games.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

Yankee gothic meets Thelma and Louise as Jennings (Mosquito Games, 1989) attempts to give undeserved significance to the Page women of Granite, New Hampshire. The Page family, headed by matriarch Nanna Page, ``who'd never dared to lay claim to infallibility, but who'd considered the possibilities,'' has eked out a marginal existence in run-down shacks in Page Village on a hillside above the town. Page men have been congenitally weak, always secondary to their women, who've never been timid about teaching them a lesson--even if it involves locking a favorite son in a shed and setting it on fire, a scene that Sarah, the protagonist, witnessed as a child when Grandmother Nanna found out that son Billy had raped his niece. Sarah, who also saw the rape, had been abandoned by their mother, Ella, a victim of ``Nanna's claws,'' who'd first tried to sell her. She's now a young grandmother whose grief has turned inward. When son Wayne and his wife Charlotte sell their baby, Sarah walks out--literally--and heads for strong daughter Hannah, who as a child had helped Sarah through her depression by staying home from school to prevent her mother from committing suicide. Alternating with flashbacks to the past, Sarah, now pregnant, helps Hannah with her own breakdown, then returns home to find Charlotte living with her husband Russ, and Wayne dumping toxic chemicals in the woods. Determined to stop him, she takes drastic action. Like grandmother Nanna, ``she sniffed his weakness and went for the throat. She wanted him, for once, to be held accountable, to face up to what he'd done.'' After Wayne's dealt with, Sarah contentedly raises her baby and savors ``whatever small truths may catch in her modest nets.'' Pretentious writing and gratuitous exploitation of fashionable themes, with stock characters in an equally worked-over setting. Still, faint glimmers of promise. -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Jennings ( Mosquito Games ) employs evocative imagery to illuminate the unenviable, hardscrabble lives of a Granite, N.H., family. Fearsome matriarch Nanna Page bestows on her three daughters a legacy of concealed emotions and withheld affection as she scornfully intimidates her husband and two sons. Only harm comes from her touch, only disdain from her glittering black "snapping turtle eyes"; however, she sternly upholds her moral code, going so far as to punish one son with death when he rapes a family member. In awe of Nanna even after she dies of cancer, the Pages cannot imagine leaving the cluster of meager shacks that constituted Nanna's domain. Sarah Huckins, Nanna's granddaughter, is a quintessential product of this harsh provincial upbringing. Her recollections of Nanna and the ways these affect Nanna's great-grandchildren make up the bulk of this tale. Readers hear how Sarah's mother abandoned her, how Sarah's son breaks her heart by selling his only child, and how Sarah's uncommunicativeness frustrates her husband. Jennings's on-target dialogue and his rural characters' extreme behavior will impress devotees of American gothic literature. Most exceptional here, though is the ominous atmosphere, featuring "dead quarries" filled with still water and a boarded-up shack that houses a dead man's cursed pickup truck. These elements are tremendously effective, daring readers to turn each page.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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