J. C. Christopher White

Gebundenes Buch

Dandelion Wine

Beschreibung

It is the summer of 1942, and the world beyond is aflame with war, but in the smothering heat of Springfield, Tennessee, another battle simmers. At its center stands Shirley Ragland, fifteen, brilliant, born into a place that believes girls should marry young and know their place. The late-in-life child of a hard-hewn father, Jim, and mother, Ora-stern and aloof-not cruel by design, but by circumstance. Into this world comes Trixie Simpson, the glamorous widow. Trixie comes to Sunday Mass smelling of sin and Chanel, and Shirley idolizes her for it. And then there's the Ragland's domestic, Earline, the Black woman who raised Shirley with the sort of love Ora couldn't bear to offer, and Earline's son, Benjamin, whose childhood bond with Shirley treads into dangerous territory. Bo Harris appears like first loves often do-genuine, untested, except to Ora-he's not good enough. He sees Shirley in a way that startles her, and in the South, being seen can be as perilous as being touched. Hovering over it all is Father Schadenfreude, the town's brooding Polish priest. With his storm-dark eyes and voice like velvet, he is a man both feared and revered. Dandelion Wine is a seething Southern coming-of-age novel steeped in longing and lit by the slow fire of defiance. And as the summer heat rises, Shirley must choose whether to shrink into the story written for her-or light a match and watch it burn.

Autor

J.C. White is an American suburban planner, technical writer, and fiction novelist. He's a lifelong lover of words and culture, traveling the world with his loving wife, Emily, and coming home to write about it. His career spans the shadowy worlds of undercover drug & violent crime enforcement, private investigator at home and abroad, a defense contractor, a real estate developer, a technical writer for various briefing books and comprehensive plans, a lobbyist/advocate for public safety, and the most dangerous world of all, suburban public planning. Through it all, words were the one honest thing-sharp when they needed to be, gentle when they could afford it. A national award-winning planner and debut novelist at sixty-one, Chris is not starting a writing career. He's finally clearing the table for it. His style has been characterized as: "Prose that thinks in memory and speaks in confession." But according to Chris, "It's just writing that's been fully lived-in."Chris writes Southern fiction. Southern gothics and historically-regionally bent threads. What binds it all together is that none of it is pretend. Chris writes gothic tropes that are awkwardly true but told with blurred faces and alias names. His stories, like the man, are Southern to the bone. Walking the line between grit, grace, and humor. He writes like a man who knows what time costs. Who's seen enough of the world to have been forged anew but misses the Chris he left behind. He understands that fiction-real fiction-is just truth with its mask off.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Southern Narratives
• Seitenzahl: 378
• Erscheinungstermin: 29. Oktober 2025
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 222mm x 145mm x 26mm
• Gewicht: 663g
• ISBN-13: 9798999028105
• Artikelnr.: 76268584