Winter Roads, Summer Fields: Stories by Marjorie Dorner - Softcover

Dorner, Marjorie

2.93

15 ratings by Goodreads

9781571310323: Winter Roads, Summer Fields: Stories by Marjorie Dorner

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571310320 ISBN 13: 9781571310323

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 2000

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"Farming used to be fun, and now it's just big business." These 12 interwoven stories richly portray the characters and scenes of farm life from the Depression to the present. "In the best of the stories, Dorner achieves a pathos reminiscent of John Steinbeck." - Newsday

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From Kirkus Reviews:

Twelve literary tales by mystery-writer Dorner (Freeze Frame, 1990, etc.) covering some 50 years in the history of a family farming community in Wisconsin--a first collection that, at its best, is a haunting evocation of mortality and its contingencies. In the first story--``Love's Mansion,'' set in 1935--Celie lives through a repressed girlhood (her mother binds her breasts) and comes to a sense of how the world is when she helps a local boy birth a calf. Here, Dorner delicately weaves together naturalistic elements and internal reverie. A later story--``Tree House,'' set in 1990--has the same Celie, now old and alone but still independent in her ``bright, almost outlandish clothes.'' She watches Jim Mueller, who has turned his farm over to his son, build a tree house, ostensibly for his grandchildren, and finally gives him her philosophy of life (``The secret is not to be afraid''). In other pieces, such as ``Herbert (1948),'' Dorner uses her excellent ear to capture the cumulative effect of small unintended cruelties among men on a threshing crew. In ``Burying Pal (1959),'' a man buries a dead horse and remembers the death of his son from measles; in ``Lee Ann's Little Killing (1971),'' a seven-year-old girl comes to an intimation of the fragility of love when she accidentally knocks out her father with a hammer. And so forth: the stories touch upon ordinary occasions in the life of a community and its values. The best of the later pieces, naturally enough, deal with grief and loss--in ``Mass for the Dead,'' a son loses his mother; in ``Changeling,'' a mother sees her ``beautiful baby'' turn into a ``big, ugly, mean-eyed boy''; and in the ``Before the Forgetting,'' set in present time, an old woman with Alzheimer's goes in and out of memory and awareness. Dorner writes without sentimentality of a vanishing world. Some of these originally appeared in literary magazines such as Great River Review. -- Copyright �1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

In her debut collection of 12 stories that follow the lives of seven families in a Midwestern farming community from the 1930s to the present, mystery writer Dorner ( Freeze Frame ) realistically portrays the hardships of rural life and evokes a bygone American era. Her straightforward, unsentimental tales use narrators of varying ages and sexes to describe brief romances, difficult births, family fights and violent deaths. While Dorner's prose style is often pedestrian in the earlier stories (several of the later, more accomplished ones first appeared in literary magazines), her skill in revealing her characters' emotions gives her work warmth and authenticity. In tales like "Changeling," which probes the thoughts of a woman visiting her son in prison, and "Lee Ann's Little Killing," about a girl who thinks she has killed her father, readers feel the protagonists' grief and hysteria. However, Dorner does not in general sufficiently develop the conflicts between characters, and some stories end on frustratingly ambiguous notes. Illustrations by Allen Servoss not seen by PW.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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