White Boys and River Girls - Hardcover

Gover, Paula K.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565120493 ISBN 13: 9781565120495

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 1995

Synopsis

The Southern Review and LSU Short Fiction Award, 1995. Here are barmaids and black musicians, single mothers and burnt-out businessmen, all struggling a little too close to the edge in lives where a lot is at risk. These nine stories draw on Paula Gover's own experience--as an army wife living in a trailer in Georgia and as an often unemployed single mother back in her Michigan hometown. A daring new writer who brings richness and depth to her fiction, Gover slices into ordinary American lives and exposes what it is that makes each one extraordinary.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

In these nine sharply affecting stories, Gover reviews the hard life lessons learned by memorable, persevering characters in small towns and suburbs of Michigan and Georgia. The utterly convincing title story is narrated by Donnie, a 34-year-old construction worker from Tyler, Ga., a former hometown football hero and veteran womanizer who becomes hooked on Yolanda, an artist quite unlike his "regular type." Gover dazzles as Yolanda, who "wore color on her lips what never rubbed off... dusty-like and dark as old blood, and real different from them shiny fruit-tasting colors," introduces Donnie to issues of race, gender and love that he'd never considered before. With a keen ear for dialect and uncompromising candor, Gover writes with respectful affection of broken families, bereaved children, troubled lovers and stalwart individuals-especially independent women-as they choose, among the concrete details of daily life, between hope and despair. "Chances with Johnson" ends the collection as Elizabeth, whose ex-husband has disappeared with the older of their two sons, gambles one last time on loving another man, one who will reward her faith far beyond her expectations. While the strongest, most immediate stories are the first-person narratives, there are no weak entries in this impressive debut collection.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

Things do not go smoothly in the lives of Gover's characters, but this is a marvelous collection of stories. Each sentence is wielded with deadly clarity, and 15 pages can be an emotional journey of immense proportions. It is an emotional rather than geographic landscape that sets these stories in a true, solid place. In the title story, a white boy from a southern town recalls his romance with a river girl. Her voodoo superstitions and hidden past prevented them from staying together; but she exposed his prejudices with a devastating honesty, and he forever feels under her spell. In "Bastard Child," a son sees in his wife a reflection of his mother, who was betrayed by the men who disappeared from her life but who retained power over her sexuality to the end. "Naked Beauty" is a touching story about a mother facing her adolescent daughter's struggle to break away, and a mother's eternal love for the child within the blossoming girl. Gover quietly overturns lives, creeping through window sashes, walking through half-opened doors. The effect is like a cool spring breeze, clear-sighted and straightforward. These are moments and emotions we'd gladly walk out of the room to ignore. But faced obliquely or head-on, they enrich us just the same. Deanna Larson

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1565120493
• ISBN 13: 9781565120495
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 225